Bawarshi Receives CCCC Exemplar Award

Anis Bawarshi, Thomas L. & Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in the Department of English, received the 2026 CCCC Exemplar Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). The award recognizes Bawarshi as representing “the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession.” CCCC is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English.

Announcing the award, the selection committee wrote of Bawarshi, "He is a brilliant scholar and thinker who has made hugely impactful contributions in and beyond the field; he is a gifted expert in pedagogy who has skillfully trained scores of students and teachers; he is a wise and generous mentor and collaborator; and he is an exceptional leader with steadfast integrity.” The committee added that Bawarshi is committed to uplifting marginalized voices and working toward a more just future.

Bawarshi’s publications include two monographs, two edited collections, two textbooks, 30 articles and book chapters, and two guest-edited special issues. In addition to field-defining contributions to Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), he has advocated for historically marginalized communities remaining at the center of disciplinary conversations. His work has fundamentally reoriented his discipline from measuring students’ learning outcomes to honoring their diverse “incomes”—the linguistic, community, and embodied knowledges students bring into classroom spaces.

The committee noted that, as a mentor and teacher, “Bawarshi’s generosity of intellectual labor — his willingness to meet students where they are and scaffold their thinking forward — now shapes how many of his students report practicing mentorship with their own students. Former students share a common practice of asking: ‘How would Anis approach this situation?’ on an almost daily basis.”

Reflecting on the award, Bawarshi says, "When I learned it was former students and longtime collaborator who had nominated me, I understood that this award, most of all, is in recognition of a particular kind of relational practice: of resisting the urge to make things legible by trying to make them fit within existing frameworks, of delaying the uptake long enough to remain present with and truly inhabit someone else’s thinking on their terms and in their intellect. I am grateful for the relational work this award represents and will do my best to keep supporting it."

Bawarshi’s administrative roles in the UW Department of English have included serving as director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric for more than a decade, director of the department's writing center (which later became the Odegaard Writing and Research Center) for nine years, and department chair for six years.