As Director of C21, Anis Bawarshi will provide leadership for the program’s two major initiatives, College Edge and gesture early career lab, while also participating in college-level initiatives that include student internships and externships, experiential learning, AI literacy, and student career development.
Joining the UW English faculty in 1999, Bawarshi specializes in the study and teaching of writing, rhetorical genre theory, and writing program administration. He directed the UW’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric for ten years and chaired the Department of English 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; Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres; Ecologies of Writing Programs: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context; and Genre and the Performance of Publics, as well as articles and chapters on writing across difference, writing knowledge transfer, collaborative writing, and uptake. He is currently co-editor for the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition book series. 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. He received the 2026 CCCC Exemplar Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English, for representing “the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession.”