I’m the Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers at George Mason University. I also serve as the English department liaison to Mason’s branch campus in Songdo, South Korea & to INTO Mason’s graduate and undergraduate pathway programs for international students provisionally-admitted to Mason.

I received a BA in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University. My MFA thesis, which I hope to continue working on someday, is titled “A Block from Bliss Street: Growing up as a child of the Lebanese civil war.” I am currently working on a transrhetorical dissertation project that aims to explore and theorize the impact of individual experiences of trauma and displacement on translingual identities and languaging practices.

I served as the Associate Director of the Mason Writing Center for five years until I transitioned to my current position as Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers. My 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 linguistically-diverse populations.

Esther volunteers as the Associate Editor of the blog Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders, a blog of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. In this role, she co-hosts and produces the blog’s podcast Slow Agency. She also oversees the co-editing of articles tackling writing center issues in the African region.

Esther Namubiru is a doctoral student in the Writing & Rhetoric program at George Mason University. Her research focuses on writing center and program administration within African contexts. Her other research interests include community literacy, multilingualism, writing across the disciplines (WAC), writing in the disciplines (WID), digital rhetoric and digital literacy.

In the past, Esther has taught graduate and undergraduate academic-writing courses for native and non-native speakers of English and developed writing course curriculum and curriculum training material for Mason faculty who work with multilingual writers in writing-intensive courses.

While receiving her MA in Linguistics from the University of Virginia, her BA in Organizational Communication at Mason, and her Associate Degree in Communication, Esther was a writing consultant at those respective institutions which grew her passion for writing and the writing center field.

Born and raised in southern China, I came to the U.S. in 2012 for advancing my education. After completing a Master of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language in 2014, I began teaching academic writing to domestic and international multilingual writers in both community college and university contexts. As a writer who uses English as an additional language, over the years, I have seen how my own writing experiences have played a part in my work as a writing tutor and writing instructor to graduate student writers.

I am one of the co-authors of An A-W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students, published in March 2021 by the University of Michigan Press.

Currently I am a doctoral candidate in Teaching and Curriculum at the Warner School of Education, University of Rochester. My dissertation research focuses on the experiences of writing tutors who are graduate students themselves and work with graduate students.