Research Statement


I position myself as a scholar of material rhetorics, multimodal composition, and digital rhetoric. I am interested in the relationship between the rhetorical, the ideological, and the material. My current work examines the way Soviet, post-Soviet, and local rhetorics enmesh to influence gender roles in the social practices of Armenian rural women who are left-behind by their husbands due to seasonal labor migration.  

Recent Projects and Articles

Kotzeva, Elitza. “#WeWillWin When We Become Good Citizens, or Hegemonic Masculinity in Armenian War  Rhetoric.”  Exploring Masculinities in the South Caucuses. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung: Goergia. Forthcoming in 2023. 

Kotzeva, Elitza. “Counter-Mapping for Resistance and Cultivation of Counter-Memory: The Social Life of Some Nagorno Karabakh Maps.” Special Issue: Social Lives of Maps.  The Material Culture Review. Forthcoming in February 2023.

Kotzeva, Elitza. “Queering Bulgarian Pop Folk, or Injecting Critical Theory into Chalga.” Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans. Forthcoming 2023.

Kotzeva, Elitza. “Stuck Between Traditional, Soviet, and post-Soviet Rhetoric: Armenian Left-behind Rural Women Negotiating Gender Roles.”  Work in progress.

Kotzeva, Elitza. “Grotesque Representations of the Rhetorical Grotesque: From Choragraphy to Performance.” enculturation.  Under review.  

Kotzeva, Elitza. Traveling Back with Time: On the Rhetorical Significance of Dureé.” Intraspection: a Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style. Issue 5, 2022.  

Kotzeva, Elitza. “Down the Rabbit Hole.” Our Body of Work: Embodied Teaching and Administration in Writing Studies. eds. Anna Sciari and Melissa Nicolas. Boulder: U of Colorado Press, 2022.

Kotzeva, Elitza, Garabet Kazanjian & Lilit Khachatryan,

“From Sacred to Sacrilegious: Armenian Human-Water Relations.” Media Seascape and the Criminal Imaginary. In Media Res, November, 2021.


Kotzeva, Elitza. “From Concerto for Sentence by Emiliya Dvoryanova, translated by Elitza Kotzeva.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 33 (1): 46-51. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.

Presentations and Older Scholarship