Elitza Kotzeva, PhD
I am an Associate Professor of English at the American University of Armenia and an interdisciplinary scholar of rhetoric, language, and cultural politics in post-Soviet Eurasia. My research examines how linguistic, visual, material, and institutional forms mediate historical change, political authority, memory, belonging, and access to knowledge across Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus.
Language, Education, and Knowledge Politics
My current research examines language policy, multilingualism, education, and knowledge production in post-Soviet Armenia. I am particularly interested in the changing relationships among Armenian, Russian, and English; the institutional and geopolitical forces that shape language policy; and the consequences of these transformations for education, intellectual authority, and access to global knowledge.
Visual-Material Culture, Memory, and Political Identity
A second strand of my work investigates monuments, maps, images, objects, bodies, performance, and built environments as sites of political and historical meaning. I study how visual and material forms mediate nationalism, gender, memory, conflict, and the contested afterlives of socialism, particularly how they enter lived environments and participate in struggles over history, identity, and belonging.
Across these projects, I am interested in the relationship between rhetoric and history and specifically how forms of representation acquire authority, how inherited meanings persist or are reconfigured, and how linguistic, visual, and material forms help communities imagine, contest, and reorganize their social worlds.
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ORCID: 0000-0002-7188-6270
Email: elitza.kotzeva@aua.am