Abir Ward

Brainstormer, Educator/Teacher, Student, Writer/Editor

Dr. Abir Ward is a writer, educator, and researcher specializing in multilingual writing, social justice pedagogy, and STEM communication. Born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia, she began her teaching career in Beirut, Lebanon, where she taught literature and language courses at the Lebanese American University. There, she launched annual creative writing workshops and poetry competitions, fostering a community of emerging writers. In 2014, she joined the American University of Beirut (AUB), where she taught academic writing, executive communication, English for international business, and technical English for engineering. She served as the lead editor of Pages Apart, a 700-page academic reader used for teaching writing, and she organized AUB’s Annual Celebration of Student Writing. As faculty advisor of TEDxAUB and Toastmasters, she mentored students in public speaking. She also taught courses in cross-cultural communication at the Olayan School of Business working with executives in the MBA and EMBA programs. Dr. Ward also founded 2Rāth, a social justice initiative focused on the politics of representation, which helped create Wikipedia articles on notable Arab women, garnering over 20 million views. She trained researchers in science writing at AUB’s School of Nursing and School of Medicine. In 2021, she was the first recipient of the CCCC Wikipedia Fellowship, working on knowledge equity and addressing publishing injustices faced by non-native English-speaking scholars. That same year, she was awarded a Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) grant from the U.S. Department of State. In 2023, she received a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in New York to develop Arabic-language training sessions for Arab science researchers on how to effectively communicate their academic work. Since joining Boston University’s Writing Program in 2022, Dr. Ward has primarily taught international students and curates TEDxBU. In Fall 2024, Dr. Ward organized Boston University’s first university-wide Celebration of Multilingual Writing at the Howard Thurman Center, bringing together faculty and students to honor linguistic diversity and multilingual writing. Currently, she is teaching a courses in public speaking and on social justice issues.

Nature, animals, neuroscience, public speaking, languages, literature, astronomy, knowledge production, yoga, meditation, thinking, teaching, and TED.

How time is a human construct

academic writing, business english, editing, Public speaking, research, teaching, training

Spotting and training speakers