Tawnya Azar

Associate Professor

Composition

Tawnya (Ravy) Azar is Term Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. She is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and received her M.A. and PhD. in English at The George Washington University. Azar has been an instructor of composition and literature in higher education since 2009. Her research interests include Community Engagement, Online Writing Instruction, Digital Composition, and Digital Literary Culture.

For more information visit: tawnyaazar.com

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3627-3230

Selected Publications

Community Engagement

Community Engagement and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Affordances and Challenges of Service Learning in Crisis. Ed. Tawnya Azar. Vernon Press, 2025. https://vernonpress.com/book/2318

Digital Composition

"Wikipedia: One of the last, best internet spaces for teaching digital literacy, public writing, and research skills in first year composition." Computers and Composition, Vol. 68 (2023). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461523000257

“Implementing Faculty Development in Multimodal Composition: A Case Study” Professionalizing Multimodal Composition: Faculty and Institutional Initiatives, edited by Shyam B. Pandey and Santosh Khadka, Routledge 2021.

Designing, Scaffolding, and Evaluating Multimodal Assignments Digital Presentation and Worksheet, Innovations in Teaching and Learning 2020, George Mason University

Digital Literary Culture

“Inside and Outside the Literary Marketplace: The Digital Products of Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie” South Asian Review. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02759527.2019.1599553. 7 May 2019.

“The Man Who Would be Popular”: An Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Twitter Feed. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989416678284 1 December 2016.

Reframing Salman Rushdie: The Politics of Representation and New Media in Transnational Public Culture ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018.

Introduction and “‘Parallel Realities’: Salman Rushdie’s Experiment with Transmedia Narratives . Words, Worlds, and Narratives: Transmedia and Immersion. Ed. Tawnya Ravy and Eric Forcier. Freeland: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014.

Book Review of Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days. The Humanist. 22 December 2015.

Grants and Fellowships

2025 Sterns SoTL Microgrant, George Mason University

2021 Center for Humanities Research Summer Grant, George Mason University

2021 Term Faculty Development Grant, George Mason University

2016 McCandish Endowment Fellowship, The George Washington University

2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Award

2013 Summer Research Fellowship, Northeast Modern Language Association

In the Media

Students Push to Bridge the Digital Divide, Access to Literacy 2021

Seeds of Change: Community Engagement Medallion Recipients and Award Nominees 2021

“Teaching Towards the Future” Composition Faculty Contributions to ITL 2020

NOVA to Host THATCAMP for Community Colleges May 23, 2016

PhD Candidate Selected for NEH Summer Institute May 17, 2015

Graduate Student Wins Prestigious Fellowship – March 28, 2013