Senior Lecturer
Dr. Abir Ward is a writer, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on multilingual writing, social justice pedagogy, public speaking, and STEM communication. Born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia, to Lebanese parents, she has lived and worked across multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. Her teaching career began in Beirut, Lebanon, where she taught literature and language courses at the Lebanese American University and launched annual creative writing workshops and poetry competitions.
In 2014, Dr. Ward joined the American University of Beirut, where she taught academic writing, executive communication, English for international business, and technical English for engineering. She also taught executive communication in the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business and developed communication workshops for faculty, researchers, and students across AUB’s School of Nursing, School of Medicine, and Clinical Research Institute. At AUB, she led the editorial work of Pages Apart, a 700-page academic reader used in writing instruction, organized the Annual Celebration of Student Writing, and mentored students in public speaking and leadership as faculty advisor to TEDxAUB, Toastmasters, and the Health Club.
Dr. Ward is the founder of 2Rāth, a social justice initiative focused on representation and digital literacy. The project brought together students, librarians, and faculty to create and improve Wikipedia articles on notable Arab women whose work had been underrepresented online. The initiative helped generate more than 20 million views and used Wikipedia editing as a way to teach students about representation, public knowledge, and writing for broader audiences. In 2021, Dr. Ward became the first recipient of the CCCC Wikipedia Fellowship and also received a Middle East Partnership Initiative grant from the U.S. Department of State. In 2023, she received support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop Arabic-language training sessions for Arab science researchers on communicating their academic work.
Since joining Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program in 2022, Dr. Ward has taught multilingual and international students in first-year writing, public speaking, and courses focused on social and racial justice. She curates TEDxBU and trains the speakers. Since Fall 2024, she has organized Boston University’s first university-wide Celebration of Multilingual Writing at the Howard Thurman Center, bringing together students, faculty, and campus partners to recognize linguistic diversity and student writing across languages, cultures, and disciplines.
Dr. Ward’s research examines the relationship between language, identity, power, and knowledge production, with particular attention to linguistic injustice, scientific publishing, and public knowledge. Across her work, she studies how language shapes access to knowledge, how multilingual scholars participate in academic publishing, and how communication practices reflect broader questions of equity, representation, and participation.