Anis Bawarshi (He/Him)

Areas of Specialization

Rhetoric and Composition Studies, Rhetorical Genre Theory and Invention, Writing Knowledge Transfer, Writing Program Administration, Writing Pedagogy.

Anis Bawarshi specializes in the study and teaching of writing, rhetorical genre theory, and writing program administration. He directed the University of Washington's Program in Writing and Rhetoric for ten years and chaired the English department for six years. His publications include Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition; Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (with Mary Jo Reiff); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (with Amy Devitt and Mary Jo Reiff); Ecologies of Writing Programs: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context (coedited with Mary Jo Reiff, Christian Weisser, and Michelle Ballif), and Genre and the Performance of Publics (coedited with Mary Jo Reiff). He has co-edited two special issues of College English. His articles have appeared in Written Communication, College English, Writing on the Edge, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, Writing Program Administration, and The Writing Center Journal. Recent chapters on translingualism, knowledge transfer, and uptake have appeared in Writing Across Difference: Theory and Intervention, Mobility Work in Composition: Translation, Migration, Transformation, and Genres of the Climate Debate. He is currently Co-Editor for the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition book series with Parlor Press. His teaching has been recognized with the Karen Shabetai Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, and he has been nominated for mentoring and leadership awards at the University of Washington.

Activities and Interests

Broadly conceived, scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition studies examines the conditions—social, political, economic, material, and cognitive—that shape how and why texts are produced, what texts do, and how texts can be taught. I am drawn to this scholarship not only because of its focus on effects and their production, but also because of its attention to seemingly ordinary cultural productions, including student writing. My research, teaching, and administrative work are all informed by an interest in such complex productions of the everyday. I am especially interested in the role that texts play in organizing, generating, and mediating everyday social practices, relations, commitments, and identities, as well as the complex ways in which individuals, through writing and other forms of language use, situate themselves and are situated within these practices in order to do things in the world. For me, writing (its study, teaching, and administration) is inseparable from the forms of social participation it enables or the forms of social organization it helps to coordinate and produce.