Faculty

Shushan Avagyan received her PhD in English Studies from Illinois State University with a specialization in Translation Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. She has taught comparative literature courses and translation workshops since 2006. Her articles and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Music & Literature, and Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. She is the translator of Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, A Hunt for Optimism and The Hamburg Score by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive), Art and Production by Boris Arvatov (Pluto), and I Want To Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (AIWA). She is the coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Translation Program at AUA.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2736

Office location: PAB 129W

Tatevik Avetisyan has been an adjunct lecturer at the American University of Armenia since 2016 teaching PR and Discourse Analysis courses.

Tatevik Avetisyan brings insights from her expertise in providing strategic communication consultancy to local and international businesses, international organizations, diplomatic missions, and academic settings. For over 14 years she has been practicing PR and communications with corporate and humanitarian organizations in Armenia and internationally.

Tatevik Avetisyan has been leading the PR Unit and projects at Deem Communications since 2011. Together with DEEM, AUA and IREX she initiated the first ever PR Summit in Armenia, a professional event that hosts local and international experts since 2014. Currently, she is also a communication and training expert in “Support to EU Communication on Reforms in Armenia II” project.

She enjoys sharing, teaching, mentoring, traveling and connecting ideas and people to reveal their full potential.

Tatevik Avetisyan holds an MA degree with the focus on Public Relations from Ball State University, Indiana, U.S. Her undergraduate specialty is in English, Spanish and teaching from Yerevan State Linguistic University after V. Brusov.

Education: 

• 2009-2011, MA, Ball State University, IN, U.S. (Muskie Fellow)
• 1998-2000, 5-year Diploma with Honor (English & Spanish, Teacher), Yerevan State Linguistic University after V. Brusov
• 2001-2002, Non-degree exchange program, Education/methodology (FSA-Ugrad), University of Wyoming, WY, U.S.

Courses taught:

• EC232 – Public Relations
• EC200 – Introduction to Discourse Analysis

Publications:

• “PR: Environmental Factors”: Emporium PR/Marketing Magazine, March 2013
• “Blindness – Not an Obstacle to Success”: www.a1plus.am, November 10, 2007: (The article was written in the framework of “South Caucasus – A Part of Europe” workshop, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, Armenia).
• “What Do You Know about Arine?”: the Sevan newspaper, issue # 14, December 6, 2004.
• “World Mental Health Day in Gavar”: the Geghama Ashkhar newspaper, issue # 13, November 4, 2004.

Research database IDs:

• https://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/123456789/194724

Awards:

• Winner of Ball State University Department of Journalism Louie Award (2010)

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2581

Office location: 607MB

Office hours: may change – Fall T TH 10:00-12:00; Spring MWF 10:30 -12:30 or T TH 10:00- 12:00

Viken Berberian received his Msc from the London School of Economics and Msc from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He teaches persuasive writing, expository writing, business journalism, creative nonfiction, and the graphic novel: comics as literature. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the Financial Times, Bomb, Granta, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, Inculte (Editions Inculte, France) and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novels, The Cyclist (Simon & Schuster, 2002), and Das Kapital: a novel of love & money markets (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and with Yann Kebbi, of the graphic novel, The Structure is Rotten, Comrade (Fantagraphics, 2019; Actes Sud, France, 2017; Edition Moderne, Switzerland, 2020, in German).

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 25 22

Office location: PAB 118W

Website: http://vikenberberian.com/

Amy Christmas gained her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Leeds in the UK. Since 2014, she has held positions in Literature programs in China, Qatar, and now Armenia, where she has taught courses in literature studies, writing and creative practice. She has also held visiting lecturer positions in Ireland, Poland, and Austria. Her academic research has explored the intersection of narrative and technologically-mediated identities, with a particular focus on the construction of self in surveillance environments. She also writes poetry, is a 2022 finalist for the Poetry International Prize, and is preparing for the release of her first full-length collection in early 2023.

Higher education

• 2014, PhD Literature, University of Leeds
• 2008, BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Leeds

Courses taught:

• EC121 English Literature Survey
• Ec247 Creative Writing: Poetry

Publications:

• Redactions, forthcoming January 2023, Stairwell Books.
• “Quantities over Qualities: Metric and Narrative Identities in Dataveillant Art Practice”, in Screen Bodies, Vol. 7, Issue 2, Winter 2022.
• “Ephialtes”, in Fauxmoir, July 2022.
• “Sea Serpent”, in The Closed Eye Open, June 2022.
• “A Better Sort of Princess”; “Changeling”; “Foil”, in Assisi, December 2021.
• Steel-Tipped Snowflakes (with Becca Miles and Izzy Jones), September 2020, Stairwell Books. [One poem from this collection nominated for a Pushcart Prize].
• “Shearling”, in 805Lit, March 2019. [Nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fiction Awards 2020].
• “Dis/connection Across the Digital Divide: Self(ish) Narratives in LOL and Catfish”, in New Cinemas, Vol. 13, Issue 2, Fall 2017.
• “Equality and Erasure: Responses to Subject Negation in the Art of Jill Magid”, in Spaces of Surveillance (eds. Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay), Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2582

Office location: PAB 137W

Office hours: MTWThF 9:30-10:30

Christian Garbis earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Lesley University. He teachers Expository Writing, Persuasive Writing, Writing For Media, and Technical Writing. His news articles, commentaries, and essays have appeared in Hetq Online, The Armenian Weekly, and Roads and Kingdoms. Christian is the author of two acclaimed blogs, Notes From Hairenik and Footprints Armenia, on which he discusses social and political issues and conveys intimate descriptions of daily life in Armenia. A third blog, The Great Garbanzo, details his culinary adventures. Apart from his prose writing, he has also written a novel, a screenplay, and numerous short stories, and he has made several short experimental films. Christian was born and raised in Greater Boston but now resides in Yerevan, Armenia. He is the father of two beaming young sons.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2681

Office location: PAB 134W

Eric Grigorian is a photojournalist with almost two decades of experience documenting everything from conflict zones to politics to celebrities to natural disasters. His clients have included Time, Newsweek, NY Times, Boston Globe and numerous other magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Eric was the recipient of the World Press Photo award in 2003.

After a long period of living and working in Los Angeles, Eric moved to Yerevan in 2013 where he also dedicates part of his time teaching visual storytelling and photography. He currently teaches Introduction to Photography at AUA.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2749

Office location: PAB 117W

Mica Hilson earned his MA in English and a BA in Mathematics from Emory University at age 18, then went on to earn his PhD in English from Indiana University. At AUA, he teaches the first-year course in Communications and the fourth-year Research Methods and Capstone courses, along with classes in American Literature and Discourse Analysis. His research on modern and contemporary literature, culture, and critical theory has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including The Comparatist, Doris Lessing Studies, and The Harold Pinter Review, as well as numerous essay collections, ranging from Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture to The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology

Higher education

• 2010, PhD in English, Indiana University
• 1998, MA in English, Emory University
• 1998, BA in Mathematics, Emory University

Courses taught:

• EC 104 – Introduction to Communications
• EC 120 – American Literature
• EC 121 – English Literature
• EC 200 – Discourse Analysis
• EC 290 – Research Methods
• EC 299 – Capstone

Publications:

• “The Cost of Whimsy in Mood Indigo and The Grand Budapest Hotel” in Re:Focus: The Works of Michel Gondry, eds. Jennifer Kirby and Marcelline Block. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP (forthcoming in early 2020).
• “Desire and Risk Management in Contagion Fiction” in Bodies of Contagion, eds. S.A. Polak, et al. Cardiff: U of Wales Press (forthcoming in early 2020).
• “Slipping Queer Under the Radar” in Curricular Innovations: LGBTQ Literatures and the New English Studies, eds. William P. Banks and John Pruitt. New York: Peter Lang (2019).
• “Reimagining the Family Tree: Property, Biopolitics, and Queer Kinship in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot.” Pacific Coast Philology 53.2 (2018).
• “’Rubbish of All Kinds’: Domesticity, Squalor, and Squatting in Doris Lessing’s Fiction.” Doris Lessing Studies 36.1 (2018).
• “The Little Revolution That Could: What can the world learn from Armenia’s successful uprising against a would-be strongman?” Slate 10 May 2018.
• “Bath-Time and Cruising Time: Temporality, Tension, and Release in Pinter.” Harold Pinter Review 1 (2017): 50-65.
• “The Forces of Habit and the Ethics of Self-Composture.” The Comparatist 40 (2016): 128-43.
• “Rooting for the Unrooted: Invasive Species and Uncanny Ecosystems in Peter Carey’s ‘Exotic Pleasures’” in The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology, eds. James Stanescu and Kevin Cummings. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 141-58.
• “A Dwarf at the Table: Hospitality and the Non-Normate Body in Modern Literature” in Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture, eds. Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge. London: Routledge, 2015.
• “‘The odd man out in the family?’ Queer Throwbacks and Reproductive Futurism in The Fifth Child” Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 2013, Vol. 370, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington Hills: Cengage/Gale, 2015.
• “A Doctor for Who(m)?: Queer Temporalities and the Sexualized Child.” Co-written with Adrianne Wadewitz. Bookbird. 2014.
• “Sharing Economies and Value Systems on the Nifty Archive” in The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, eds. Rebecca Dean and Patrick Keilty. Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013.
• “‘The odd man out in the family?’ Queer Throwbacks and Reproductive Futurism in The Fifth Child” in Doris Lessing Studies 30.1 (2011): 18-22.
• “The ‘Problem’ of William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner” in Literary Griot: International Journal of Black Expressive Cultural Studies 14.1-2 (2002): 103-23.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 26 71

Office location: PAB 120W

Office hours: 1:00-2:30 MWF

Elitza Kotzeva has a PhD in English Studies with a focus on Rhetoric from Washington State University. She holds a Certificate in Applied Literary Translation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduate degrees in Slavic Languages (Czech, Slovak, and Bulgarian), Local Development, and English Literature from universities in Bulgaria, Italy, and the United States. Her research explores the intersections of material rhetorics, performance studies, feminist geography, and rhetorical ethnography. Elitza’s publications appear in journals dedicated to the study of material culture and rhetoric. She has published translations in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, and Apofenie.

Higher education:

• 2019, PhD in English, Washington State University
• 2015, Certificate in Applied Literary Translation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 2012, MA in English, Appalachian State University
• 2004, МА in Local Development, University of Trento and University of Bolzano, Italy
• 2002, MA in Slavic Studies: Czech, Slovak, and Bulgarian, Sofia University, Bulgaria

Courses taught:

• EC 121 English Literature Survey
• EC 120 American Literature Survey
• EC 213 Digital Literacy and Multimodal Composition
• EC 223 Shakespeare
• EC 290 Research Methods
• EC 299 Capstone Research
• CTRA 381 History and Theories of Translation (graduate class)

Publications: 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• Kotzeva, E. and Anders, B. “Engineering a Dialogue with Klara, or Ethical Invention with Generative AI in the Writing Classroom.” Journal of Academic Writing. 13 (2) Winter 2023. 73-80.
• Kotzeva, E. with Bzdigian, N., Gevorgyan, S., Khachatryan L. “Rhetorical Resilience and Righteous Discontent in Eurasia: Female Students Leading the Way.” Cluster Conversation: Addressing the Barriers between Us and that Future: Feminist Activist Coalition Building in Writing Studies. Peitho. 26 (1). Fall 2023.
• Kotzeva, Elitza. “Counter-Mapping for Resistance and Cultivation of Counter-Memory: The Social Life of Some Nagorno Karabakh Maps.” Special Issue: Social Lives of Maps. Material Culture Review. July 2023.
• Kotzeva, Elitza. Traveling Back with Time: On the Rhetorical Significance of Dureé.” Intraspection: a Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style. Issue 5, 2022.

Book Chapters

• “#WeWillWin When We Become Good Citizens, or Hegemonic Masculinity in Armenian War  Rhetoric.” Exploring Masculinities in the South Caucuses. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung: Georgia. Forthcoming in Fall 2023.
• “Queering Bulgarian Pop-Folk: Hybridity, Gaga Feminism, and Defamiliarization in Chalga.” The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans. Forthcoming in July 2024.
• “Down the Rabbit Hole.” Our Body of Work: Embodied Teaching and Administration in Writing Studies. eds. Anna Sciari and Melissa Nicolas. Boulder: U of Colorado Press, 2022.

Other Publications

• Collaboration with Garabet Kazanjian & Lilit Khachatryan, “From Sacred to Sacrilegious: Armenian Human-Water Relations.” Media Seascape and the Criminal Imaginary. In Media Res, November, 2021.
• “From Concerto for Sentence by Emiliya Dvoryanova, translated by Elitza Kotzeva.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 33 (1):  46-51. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
• “Czech Short Fiction.” Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2012

Literary Translations

• Poetry by poets of the Bulgarian circle New Social Poetry. Apofenie. Volume 7: Justice. June 2019.
• Excerpt from Invisibleby Nataliya Deleva. Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Fall 2018 Issue. The University of Iowa.
• Concerto for Sentence by Emiliya Dvoryanova. Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2016. (Bulgarian to English)
• “From Concerto for Sentence by Emiliya Dvoryanova, translated by Elitza Kotzeva.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 33 (1): 46-51. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
• Born under a Lucky Star by Ilona Lacková. Centre de Recherches Tsiganes, Université “René Descartes”, Paris, France. Sofia: Litavra Publishing, 2000. (Czech to Bulgarian)

Work in Progress

• Kotzeva, E. “‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ or Affect and Ethics in a Spectacle of Distant Suffering: 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War Documentaries.” Special Issue: Images of War. Studies of Eastern European Cinema. Forthcoming in Spring 2024. Article submitted, under review.
• Kotzeva, E. “Face-Shaping Power of the Postfeminist Male Gaze, or Digital Lateral Surveillance in Armenia.” Cluster Conversation: Talking Back through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies. Peitho. Forthcoming in Spring 2024. Article accepted.
• “Stuck Between Traditional, Soviet, and post-Soviet Rhetoric: Armenian Left-behind Rural Women Negotiating Gender Roles.” Article.

Service: 

• 2022-now, Associate editor at International Exchanges on the Study of Writing Book Series
• 2022-now, Shakespeare Theatre Fall Fest
• 2021-now, AUA TEDxAUA Club Advisor
• 2020-2021, Developed and implemented the EC Common Read Program
• 2020-2021, AUA Library Advisory Committee Member
• 2020-2021, AUA Student Book Club Advisor

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 26 72

Office location: PAB 131W

Office hours: M/W 15:30—16:30 or schedule an appointment at https://elitza.youcanbook.me/

Website: www.elitzakotzeva.com

Ruben Malayan is an an award-winning art director and visual artist. His career in graphic design spans over twenty years – crossing over into the fields of visual identity design, typography and calligraphy. Over the years he has lectured and taught workshops of calligraphy in the United States, Canada, Russia, Poland, Romania and Armenia. Ruben’s work has been published in a number of books and magazines in Israel, Armenia, US, Netherlands and France. He exhibits art locally and abroad.

Education:

• May 1993, MA, Graphics, Yerevan State Institute of Fine Arts
• May 1990 BA, Painting, Yerevan State Art College

Courses taught:

• EC 269 – Visual Communication

Publications:

• Armenian section of  ‘The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy’ Sterling Publishing, NYC 2011

Awards: 

• 2015 Best Digital Entry at Centennial Art Contest of LA City Council
• 1999 UNDP Armenia Internet Project and Sard 99 Armenian Website Prize Jury. Title of winner in the category “Armenian FREENET Choice”- for good design by means of computer technologies and wonderful art

Websites:

www.15levels.com

www.ArmenianCalligraphy.com

www.ArmenianGenocidePosters.org

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2581

Office location: 607MB

Office hours: 11:00-12:00AM (Wednesday & Friday)

A writer and journalist, Maria has over a decade of experience reporting the news from Armenia and the region. She is the Founding Editor of EVN Report, an English-language news magazine. She was Associate Editor of the Armenian Reporter, Managing Editor at CivilNet, and a regular contributor to a number of Diaspora publications. She teaches Media & Society, Introduction to Journalism, and Research Methods.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2745

Office location: PAB 131W

Gariné Torossian is a filmmaker and visual artist. Retrospectives of her work have been shown at the MoMa, Centre Pompidou, Film Forum, and the Berlinale. Her work has garnered a number of awards, including best documentary at the Warsaw international film festival and best short at the Berlinale. Her work has been broadcast on Arte France and the Sundance Channel. She is a recipient of a DAAD (Berliner Künstlerprogramm) filmmaker fellowship in Berlin.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2522

Office location: PAB 118W

Michael T. Smith is an Associate Professor in English and Communication. He received his Phd from Purdue University, West Lafayette in 2014. He was a founding member of the transdisciplinary studies program at Purdue. Following this position, he worked in Saudi Arabia before coming to AUA. His primary research interests include transdisciplinarity, literary studies, and film.

Higher education

• May 2014, PhD, Purdue University
• May 2009, MA, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
• May 2005, BS, University of Illinois at U-C

Courses taught:

• EC 104: Introduction to Composition
• EC 290 Research Methods

Publications:

• “Disability on Film: An Exploration of Film Codes’ Obstructiveness in City Lights and Children of a Lesser God.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. Forthcoming 2021.
• “The Animal in Pope’s Essay on Man.” Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies 7 (2021).
• “Not Privy to The Conversation: Harry Caul as a Peripheral Character in Coppola’s Film.” Cineaction. (May 2020).
• “A Stationary Stroll through Hong Kong: An Exploration of the Flâneur in a Groundless City. Yonsei Journal 11.2 (Winter 2019).
• “Kyu: A Semantic Analysis of Kin-Dza-Dza!” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 8 (2017): 765-774.
• Smith, Michael. Evans, Jeff. “Storytelling as Transdisciplinarity: An Experiment in First-Year Composition and Communication” (Chapter) Educational Technology and Narrative: Story and Instructional Design. Eds. Brad Hokanson, et al. Springer: 103-113.
• Evans, Jeffrey; Seipel, Justin; Smith, Michael. “Our Journey into Learning Innovation and Competency-Based Education.”
  -Polytechnic Institute Summit 2017. Conference Proceedings (June 2017) Online.
• Exeter, Marisa; Gray, Colin; Smith, Michael. “Integrating Liberal Education Perspectives in a Transdisciplinary Design Studio.” Polytechnic Institute Summit 2017. Conference Proceedings (June 2017) Online.
• “The Dedalus Complex: A Lacanian Analysis of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 16 (2016): 251-269.
• “The Postmodernism of Postmodernism: It’s a ‘Funny’ Story.” Philologist: Journal of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies 7.13 (2016): 455-66.
• “Stanley Kubrick’s Wet Dream: A Reading of Bodily Fluids in Dr. Strangelove.” Cinematic Codes Review 1.1 (Spring 2016): 91-109.
• “You Know My Name (Look up the Number): The Structural Significance of Plato’s Lambda Formula in John Donne’s ‘A Litany.’” Renascence LXVI.4 (Fall 2014): 235-254.
• “Silence in Frederick Wiseman’s Documentaries.” Studies in Documentary Film 7.1 (2013): 31-44. ISSN: 17503280; Online ISSN: 17503299
• “A Theoretical Analysis of the Phonology of Classic Rock Lyrics” SONUS 33.2 (Spring 2013): 21-30. FEIN #222533919
• “Notes on Buster Keaton” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media 38 (Fall 2012): 91-102.
• “A Manifesto on Bad Films” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012). Online.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: +37460 61 2673

Office location: PAB 135W

Office hours: MW 1:30-4:00, Tu-Th 3:00-4:00