From the Lead Editor: 2026-2027 has just started and our blog team has grown! We’re welcoming a new lead editor Inas Mahfouz and two new Regional Editors: Maria Eleftheriou from the American University of Sharjah, UAE and Svetlana Suchkova from Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. We asked each editor to share what brought them to writing center work. We hope you enjoy getting to know them!

Maria Eleftheriou (Regional Editor, Middle East)

I did not expect writing center work to become such an important part of my professional life when I first came to the American University of Sharjah in 2003. I had only recently graduated in education and was just beginning my academic career. Almost as soon as I arrived, I was given responsibility for a Writing Center that, at the time, functioned much like a laundry service: students slipped their papers under the door to be corrected and collected them later in the day. I knew very little about writing center theory or practice, but the idea of simply correcting papers rather than talking with the students who wrote them seemed counterintuitive, so I began reading the scholarship.

The more I learned, the more I began to imagine a Writing Center built around collaboration and process, not just correction. I developed a peer tutoring program and recruited, trained, and mentored tutors. Today, our Center includes a staff of 30 undergraduate and graduate tutors, as well as a Writing Fellows Program that brings peer writing support into university courses in all disciplines. That early shift in how I understood writing center work eventually led me to make peer tutoring the focus of my doctoral dissertation, and it continues to shape my work today. 

Now an Associate Professor of English in the English Department at AUS and Director of the Writing Center, I teach undergraduate writing courses and courses in our MA TESOL program. But much of the work that has shaped me professionally has happened in the Writing Center itself. I have watched tutors grow in confidence, develop new skills, discover abilities they did not know they had, find new professional interests, and even change the direction of their lives because of their experiences as tutors. I have also seen the students they work with become more confident through conversations about their writing rather than simply receiving corrections. Those transformations, both in tutors and in the writers they support, are among the reasons writing center work matters so much to me.

Working in the Middle East has also shaped the questions I ask as a researcher. A lot of writing center scholarship has emerged from North American contexts, and those perspectives do not always capture the linguistic and cultural realities of our work here. This has drawn me to research grounded in our own context, including multilingual writing, peer tutoring, tutor development, and, these days, how generative AI is reshaping the field. 

I am excited to join the WLN Blog as a Regional Editor and look forward to bringing greater visibility to work across the region. I also hope to create space for the experiences and challenges that emerge from our contexts, especially the voices of practitioners whose work may not always find its way into traditional academic publications but whose experiences have much to contribute to the wider writing center community.

Svetlana Suchkova (Regional Editor, Europe)

I am an associate professor, teacher trainer, and materials developer. Currently, I am the director of the Academic Writing Center at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. I hold a PhD degree in philology. I authored and co-authored a number of EFL course books for Russian university students and researchers, among them English for Academics series (CUP, 2014, 2015) and How to write a research article (Nauka, 2020). I have participated at numerous national and international conferences with presentations and workshops. My areas of expertise are academic writing, writing for research and publication purposes, public speaking, and teacher training.

Inas Mahfouz (Lead Editor)

I am a corpus linguist by training and both my MA and PhD focused on the analysis of corpora; my PhD dissertation analyzed how micro and macro textual cues can be used to disambiguate polysemous verbs. 

Working with large corpora made me fascinated with the concept of ‘choice’. I realized that a text is basically a number of choices woven to create some meanings. My current research projects include: (1) meta-discourse markers in academic writing: a cross-cultural study which I started during her fellowship at the Writing center at Dartmouth College in Summer 2017 and (2) the Arab Learner English Corpus (ALEC): a corpus of Freshman writing hosted by the Learner Corpus Association. 

I am also an associate professor of language and linguistics at the American University of Kuwait. I am also chair of the English Department where I teach a variety of language courses and academic writing. When I joined the AUK in 2010, I noticed how visiting the writing center can help my students write better papers. This made me start looking deeper into the role that writing centers can play in supporting multilingual writers. I made it a common practice to hold workshops there or mandate visiting the writing center at least once while they are working on a major task.

I am specifically interested in multilingualism at the centers and the different languages that are used during the sessions. Working in an environment where English is the chosen medium of instruction although it is not the language our students speak at home has made multilingualism an aspect of my students’ life. Teaching second language writing and examining learners corpora have made me realize multilingual writers bring diverse cultural backgrounds to their writing classes which shape how they adopt and apply the guidelines of academic writing.