Director of the Center for 21st Century Liberal Learning
As director of the College of Arts and Sciences Center for 21st Century Liberal Learning (C21), Anis Bawarshi provides leadership for C21’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.
College Edge (formerly known as Early Fall Start) offers a high-impact summer program primarily for incoming first-year students. It involves faculty-led small, discussion-based seminars that blend experiential learning, community engagement, metacognition, AI literacy, and curiosity to help students transition confidently into university life.
The gesture early career lab, with a decade-long record of research and development into and support for student career readiness, serves as the College’s only cross-disciplinary, early-career program for undergraduates. It has launched a wide range of programs, including in-person and virtual career readiness workshops, study abroad programs, a liberal arts hackathon, an externship program with Microsoft and Amazon, an intensive Internship Bootcamp, and an online video and podcast series, all focused on early career success specific to College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) students. As AI rapidly changes career readiness, gesture has been a CAS leader in supporting student AI literacy and prototyping courses such as “Learning with AI” as well as “AI in Early Career” to create space for students and faculty to reflect on, discuss, and experience how AI is impacting how we learn and what it means to interact with new technologies critically, ethically, and creatively.
As a professor of English at the UW since 1999, Bawarshi specializes in the study and teaching of writing, rhetorical genre theory, and writing program administration. He directed the University of Washington'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.
Bawarshi’s 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.”