Research
My scholarship brings together writing studies, rhetoric, language policy, and post-Soviet regional studies. Across these fields, I investigate how institutions establish credible knowledge, how writers and communities negotiate linguistic and material constraints, and how public discourse influences memory, political identity, and access to participation.
These concerns converge in five interconnected strands focused on language, rhetoric, institutional authority, materiality, and public life.
These concerns converge in five interconnected strands focused on language, rhetoric, institutional authority, materiality, and public life.
This line of my research examines how Armenian, Russian, and English shape education, knowledge production, and institutional authority in post-Soviet Armenia. I study language policy not only as the regulation of language use but also as a mechanism that structures access to scholarship, higher education, professional mobility, and international participation.
My work asks how Armenia can strengthen Armenian as a language of specialized knowledge while retaining practical access to Russian-language networks and expanding engagement with English-dominated academic and professional institutions. It also considers whether educational internationalization broadens opportunity or creates new inequalities between institutions, regions, and social groups.
Current Projects:
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Koppy, Kate, editors. Teaching Writing in English at the Decolonial Turn in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Under contract with the WAC Clearinghouse and the University Press of Colorado, forthcoming in 2027.
“Between Russian and English: Language Policy, Education, and Knowledge Politics in Post-Soviet Armenia.” Chapter in development for Handbook of Language Policies in the Caucasus and Central Asia, edited by Thomas Weir. Forthcoming in 2027.
Material Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Post-Soviet Space
My research at the intersection of material rhetoric and writing studies examines how objects, monuments, maps, bodies, and built environments participate in meaning-making. I study material artifacts not simply as subjects represented in discourse but as rhetorical agents that organize memory, invite or restrict public participation, and shape the conditions under which people write about the past.
Тhis work focuses on post-socialist and post-Soviet spaces, where monuments and other cultural artifacts become contested sites of historical interpretation. I examine how citizens use writing, performance, visual intervention, and embodied interaction to challenge official narratives and produce alternative forms of public memory. My work on maps and cross-stones similarly considers how material objects carry local histories across geographical, linguistic, and political boundaries.
This strand also contributes to writing studies by asking how attention to artifacts changes the teaching and study of writing. Objects can function as prompts, archives, evidence, and participants in composition. They invite writers to connect material observation with memory, place, cultural interpretation, and public argument.
Selected Publications and Current Projects:
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Cross-Stones.” Writing Artifacts, edited by Cydney Alexis and Hannah J. Rule. Routledge, pp. 61-69, 2026.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “From Admiring Death Masks to Spray-Painting Communist Monuments, or Citizens Revisiting Collective Memory.” Historical Geography, vol. 52, 2026, pp. 105–135. doi:10.1353/hgo.2024.a990105.
Kotzeva, Elitza. "Counter-Mapping for Resistance and Cultivation of Counter-Memory: The Social Life of Some Nagorno Karabakh Maps." Material Culture Review, vol. 94, no. 2, 2023, Special Issue: Social Lives of Maps. doi.org/10.7202/1102339ar.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Traveling Back with Time: On the Rhetorical Significance of durée.” Intraspection: a Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, vol. 5, 2022.
Writing Studies, Public Writing, and Translingual Pedagogy
In writing studies, I investigate how writers participate in public knowledge production across linguistic, institutional, and geopolitical boundaries. My interests include public writing, translingual pedagogy, writing across the curriculum, digital literacy, and the rhetorical conditions under which locally grounded knowledge becomes credible and visible to wider audiences.
Much of this scholarship grows from teaching in multilingual and English-medium settings. It considers how students negotiate genre conventions, translation, neutrality, sourcing, and institutional standards when writing for public platforms such as Wikipedia. It also asks how writing pedagogy can help students intervene in unequal systems of knowledge production without treating English as either inherently liberating or simply imperial.
I approach writing as a form of civic participation and institutional action. These projects consider how instruction can prepare students to move among academic, public, digital, and professional contexts while remaining attentive to audience, ethics, linguistic difference, and power.
Selected Publications and Current Projects:
“Localizing Justice: Wikipedia, Neutrality, and the Politics of Knowledge in an Armenian Writing Classroom.” Chapter in development for the edited collection Teaching Writing in English at the Decolonial Turn in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Brent Anders. “Engineering a Dialogue With Klara, or Ethical Invention With Generative AI in the Writing Classroom”. Journal of Academic Writing, vol. 13, no. 2, Dec. 2023, pp. 73-80. doi:10.18552/joaw.v13i2.989.
Kotzeva, Elitza. "Down the Rabbit Hole." Our Body of Work: Embodied Teaching and Administration in Writing Studies, edited by Anna Sciari and Melissa Nicolas, University of Colorado Press, 2022. doi:org/10.7330/9781646422340.c005.1
Gender, Surveillance, War, and Digital Public Culture
My work in feminist rhetoric examines how gender, surveillance, affect, and ethical responsibility operate in wartime and digital communication. These projects focus particularly on Armenia and the broader post-Soviet region.
Selected Publications and Current Projects:
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Shahnazaryan, Nona, editors. Women in Conflict, War, and Revolution in Post-Soviet Space, forthcoming in 2027.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Performing Nationalism: Affective Economies of Protest in Armenia.” Special Issue: The Micropolitics of Delights and Distortions in Contemporary Nationalisms: Pleasure, Performance, and Populist Embodiment. Cultural Studies, forthcoming in 2027.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Rhetorical Ethics of Humor in War Memes.” Memes and Rhetorical Identity, edited by Derek Sparby. University of Colorado Press, forthcoming in 2026.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “’Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ or Affect and Ethics in a Spectacle of Distant Suffering: 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War Documentaries.” Eastern European Screen Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2025, pp. 1-19. doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2024.2446050.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Face-Shaping Power of the Postfeminist Gaze, or Digital Rhetorical Lateral Surveillance in Armenia.” Cluster Conversation: Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Approaches. Peitho. vol. 27, no. 1, Fall 2024. doi: 10.37514/PEI-J.2024.27.1.09.
Kotzeva, Elitza. "Queering Bulgarian Pop-Folk: Hybridity, Gaga Feminism, and Defamiliarization in Chalga." The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans, edited by Catherine Baker, 1st ed., Routledge, 2024. doi: 10.4324/9781003328162-33.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “#WeWillWin When We Become Good Citizens, or Hegemonic Masculinity in Armenian War Rhetoric.” Masculinities in the South Caucasus: Forms, Hierarchies and Challenges, edited by Davit Gabunia et al. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2024.
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Nairy Bzdigian, Sona Gevorgyan, and Lilit Khachatryan. “Rhetorical Resilience and Righteous Discontent in Eurasia: Female Students Leading the Way.” Cluster Conversation: Addressing the Barriers between Us and that Future: Feminist Activist Coalition Building in Writing Studies. Peitho. vol. 26, no. 1. Fall 2023.
Public Writing and Environmental Justice
I also study public writing as a form of civic participation, particularly where students and communities translate local knowledge for global audiences. My recent work investigates Wikipedia, climate literacy, and the unequal infrastructures through which knowledge becomes credible and publicly visible.
Selected Publications and Current Projects:
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Irina Ghaplanyan. “Resisting Slow Violence and Re-imagining Sustainability within a Traditional Rural Russian Community in Armenia.” Reconceptualizing Sustainability Literacies: Practices and Possibilities in the Community and Classroom, edited by Katie Silvester and Kaylie Fougerousse. WAC Clearinghouse: Perspectives in Writing Series, forthcoming in 2026.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “From Public Knowledge to Situated Critique: Wikipedia, Climate Literacy, and Environmental Justice in an Armenian Writing Classroom.” Words into Action: Rhetorics to Build a Sustainable Future, edited by Charles Bazerman et al. WAC Clearinghouse: International Exchanges on the Study of Writing, forthcoming in 2027.
Kotzeva, Elitza, and Garabet Kazanjian, and Lilit Khachatryan. “From Sacred to Sacrilegious: Armenian Human-Water Relations.” In Media Res, special issue: Media Seascape and the Criminal Imaginary, Nov. 2021.
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