Gregory J. Palermo is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Emory University Writing Program and Affiliated Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, where he serves as Co-Director of Center for the Future of Trust. He works at the nexus of writing studies and digital humanities, applying rhetorical theory and computational methods to understand how trust is created, maintained, and broken with quantitative data. 

Palermo’s research and teaching advance a critical and digital pedagogy that positions mutual vulnerability as essential to establishing common ground across disciplinary divides. Challenging the idea that quantitative results “speak for themselves,” he teaches data-driven researchers to build trust with their audiences by making their analytical and interpretive choices visible as they translate their expertise and findings for others. 

At Emory, he regularly teaches the high-demand Technical Writing for Data Science course and co-developed an Introduction to Text as Data course with Center Co-director and Professor Jo Guldi. In his teaching, he prompts students to approach exploratory and collaborative writing projects iteratively while revising their knowledge of genres and methods. When applying quantitative methods to writing tasks like reviewing the research literature or composing literate programming notebooks, they learn to convey the impact of their choices of methods and parameters not by reporting them in retrospect, but by enacting their thinking for readers. At the Center for the Future of Trust, Palermo helps lead a multigenerational team of research assistants and colleagues in extending their repertoire of reflexive research writing practices. 

Before joining Emory, Palermo earned his Ph.D. in English with a Certificate in Digital Humanities from Northeastern University. Beyond Emory, he serves as Co-editor of Reviews for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. His scholarship has appeared in the collection Mentorship and Methodology: Reflections, Praxis, and Futures, as well as the Journal of Writing Analytics and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His current research focuses on citation analysis and disciplinary metaphor, using computational methods from bibliometrics to map the “terrain” of academic fields rather than treating citations as simple metrics of impact.