Please welcome to the blog our new associate editor for the Middle East and North Africa, Anna Habib – editor.

Anna S. Habib is the Associate Director of Composition, at both the George Mason University home campus and at the branch campus in Songdo, South Korea & coordinator and instructor in the Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines courses for INTO Mason, Mason’s pathway program for graduate and undergraduate international students.

Anna Habib

Anna S. Habib was born in Beirut, Lebanon, during the civil war to a Lebanese father and American mother. When she was four years old, her family fled to the neighboring island of Cyprus where she grew up in a community of refugees from surrounding countries. As a bi-cultural, bi-national child from a post-colonial context, she grew up with English, Arabic and French as native languages and Greek as a second language. These intercultural, translingual experiences inspired her to pursue a BA in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. She graduated from the MFA program in 2006. Her thesis, which she hopes to continue working on someday, is titled “A Block from Bliss Street: Growing up as a child of the Lebanese civil war.” She is currently pursuing her PhD in Writing and Rhetoric also at Mason, where she served as the Associate Director of the Writing Center for five years until she transitioned to her current position as Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers.

Her research and publications have focused on the experiences of multilingual writers adapting to the expectations of the U.S. academy, faculty perceptions of writing by multilingual students,  and designing writing courses that are attuned to the diverse needs of this population. She is currently working on an auto-ethnography that aims to explore and theorize individual experiences of trauma and displacement.

Some stories she’s working on

1) A place for Writing Centers in Uganda:  A former writing center tutor, now EAP faculty member in Mason’s international pathway program, will reflect on her experiences as a student learning about writing and learning to write in the post-colonial context of Uganda.

2) Building a Writing Center on a U.S. branch campus in South Korea. A collaborative piece between the Director of Academic Resource Center and the Program Coordinator of Composition at the George Mason University branch campus in S. Korea.

3) How writing center tutoring experience and research on writing centers informed and influenced a Chair of Education at the University of Balamand in her role as a university administrator, her teaching in a multilingual/translingual context and her MA thesis supervision.

4) a story on the challenges of writing center development in a truly translingual/multilingual/post-colonial context where writing mostly occurs in French and Arabic in the secondary schools and then is expected to occur in English in most of the prestigious higher education contexts in the country.

5) Brainstorming a story from Saudi Arabia and am in touch with a few people there.

6) A piece about research that came out of the George Mason Writing Center in 2006 by a team of tutors/administrators on the experiences of international students adapting to writing in the U.S. academy. We published a research monograph and posted our findings on a website: writtenaccents.gmu.edu.