YEREVAN, Armenia — As the Fall 2025 semester approaches, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is pleased to welcome Assistant Professor Dr. Adina-Camelia Arvatu to the faculty of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS).
Before joining AUA, Dr. Arvatu served as a writing instructor in the Writing Center Program at the School of Sciences and Humanities at Nazarbayev University (NU) in Astana, Kazakhstan. There, she taught courses in rhetoric and composition and public speaking, as well as a graduate writing seminar for Ph.D. students in Eurasian Studies.
In 2023, Dr. Arvatu became the coordinator of the Writing Fellows training program and the instructor for one of its courses. In the latter role, she supervised Writing Fellows’ original empirical research projects, which explored a variety of topics of interest in writing center studies from a Central-Asian perspective.
“In most cases, these mini-capstone projects were the Fellows’ first experience with research with human subjects,” she explained. “It was my job to guide them through the process of thinking deeply about the ethical aspects of such research and applying for the approval of the institutional review board, as well as collecting and analyzing data.” By the time Dr. Arvatu left NU, five of the Writing Fellows program graduates had published articles in Young Scholars in Writing, the premier undergraduate research journal in rhetoric, writing, and writing center studies.
Reflecting on her approach to teaching, Dr. Arvatu said: “As a teacher, I am committed to genre pedagogies in writing instruction because I see them as a way of boosting students’ academic literacy and self-efficacy. Genre-based writing instruction bridges the gap between language instruction and ‘content’ teaching in the disciplines. In my courses, students are encouraged to reflect on the pragmatic (including institutional) aspects of writing and to adapt their textual strategies to the constraints and opportunities of their context. This, I think, is a major strength of my teaching, which draws on decades of critical interdisciplinary research into writing as a socio-rhetorical process.”
Dr. Arvatu received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. As a philosopher, she specializes in issues of historical epistemology and the philosophy of the social sciences — specifically, how knowledge practices get codified in various discourse communities and epistemic cultures. Her doctoral dissertation aimed to distill the logic of interdisciplinarity that scholars like Michel Foucault started outlining even as interdisciplinary research was still in its infancy in the dominant epistemic cultures in the West.
Dr. Arvatu’s passion for genre studies, at the level of both theory and pedagogy, fuels her teaching practices. She is interested in exploring how the rise of interdisciplinary research is already transforming the way things are done in disciplines, and how those transformations may disrupt genres and conventions that were long assumed to be stabilized. “Similarly, I am fascinated by the transformations in science communication that seek to go beyond popularization (with its knowledge deficit model), which have led to the emergence of new research presentation genres like the 3-Minute Thesis,” she added.
Dr. Arvatu is also interested in assessing how big educational agenda items or policies, such as internationalization and English-medium instruction, are translated into the day-to-day functioning of programs in higher education institutions in Expanding Circle countries. A third area of interest for Dr. Arvatu is the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) pedagogy that would supplement, and likely transform, existing writing pedagogies — specifically, how critical thinking may need to be reconceived under the stress-test of generative AI capabilities.
Regarding the most anticipated aspect of her AUA experience, Dr. Arvatu shared: “It would be immodest to say ‘everything,’ wouldn’t it? It would also be uninformative. I think the people — AUA students, staff, colleagues — are the number one attraction for me. My first interactions with AUA faculty, leadership and staff were amazing. They’ve always made me feel welcome and valued. We share a deep interest in collaboration, in meeting students where they are and coming up with new and engaging ways to enhance their learning. So, I would say that meeting and working with the people — including students — who are AUA is the thing I’m looking forward to the most.
Let me try to put it more simply and vividly. One of my students summed up her journey as a Writing Fellow at my former institution with a very apt quote from Virginia Wolf: ‘I am rooted, but I flow.’ She tied it to the grounding you get from your community, which allows you to stay open to the future, to welcome and navigate whatever comes next. This quote has stayed with me. So I would say that the thing I am looking forward to the most is acquiring AUA roots that will keep me flowing.”
Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values.