A researcher, a teacher, and a reader of difficult texts.

Dr. Hammonds began teaching in 2010 in Texas secondary schools, leading speech and theatre classes. He moved into university teaching during graduate school and has since taught communication, media studies, public speaking, and writing at four institutions.

He joined the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at UT Dallas in 2023 and now serves as Program Head of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. His undergraduate courses cover American popular culture, intellectual inquiry, and a special topic on superheroes and American mythology.

The research thread that runs through this work is hermeneutics: the philosophy of how readers and audiences build meaning from texts. Hammonds is especially interested in the moments when meaning goes wrong — when fans turn a film into a political weapon, when a community misreads its own founding stories, when a piece of pop culture becomes a vehicle for something it never set out to carry.

His first book, Interpreting and Transmitting Kynicism in Joker (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), studies one such case in detail. Other work has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, Transformative Works and Cultures, and a number of edited volumes on philosophy and popular media.

Hammonds co-hosts Special Topics in Media, a podcast on film, comics, and culture, and serves on the editorial board of The Phoenix Papers. He lives in the Dallas area.