AY25 Comrie Fellowship Recipient, Wei Xu, SLAT Ph.D. Candidate
For Wei Xu, a native of China’s southern province who has traveled the world in pursuit of her education, the stars have aligned once more as the winner of the 2024-2025 prestigious Andrew C. Comrie GIDP Doctoral Fellowship.
Wei Xu, SLAT GIDP PhD candidate, winner of AY25 Andrew C. Comrie Doctoral Fellowship.
This Graduate Interdisciplinary Program fellowship honors Dr. Comrie’s unwavering commitment to interdisciplinary research and study. Dr. Comrie, the Chief Academic Officer for the Arizona Board of Regents, is a geographer, interdisciplinary climate scientist, and former Provost at the University of Arizona. He holds an academic appointment as Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment, with joint appointments in Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences and in Public Health. Dr. Comrie has published widely in specialized and interdisciplinary international journals and his work has been funded by federal, state and local agencies.
Xu began her studies at the University of Arizona in the SLAT GIDP doctoral program in 2020. Prior to this, Xu earned her undergraduate degree in English in her home country, and a master’s degree in the United Kingdom. She has been teaching English writing since 2017.
“Receiving this award boosts my confidence in myself as this prestigious award is deemed as a recognition and honor. It also strengthens my identity as an interdisciplinary scholar,” Xu said. She is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Second Language Acquisition & Teaching GIDP, and this award enables Xu to focus solely on completing her dissertation and on her job search. “I now also have more time for workouts, hiking, and cooking,” she said, noting that this creates time for self-care and mental health care.
“I found interdisciplinary research exceptionally important for today's world, as it allows us to view a complex problem from a more holistic view while from different angles. It also fosters collaboration between scholars from different disciplines, which I see is more than essential in academia,” she said, noting that prior to her PhD studies, she had begun to be wary of an “Ivory Tower thinking mode” and understood the importance of looking at an issue from diverse perspectives, instead.
Research Interests
Xu’s dissertation is titled, Exploring multilingual writers’ genre knowledge across languages.
As an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar whose work draws on applied linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies, and technology and media studies, Xu aspires to drive transformative changes in writing education for multilingual and multicultural student populations. Her research revolves around multilingual writing, genre studies, multimodal composition, and AI-assisted writing. At its core, her work aims to prepare students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds to become flexible and effective writers through synergistically employing language, genre-related, technological, and multimodal resources.
“I ambitiously envision my future professional identity as a transdisciplinary educator whose work can exert an influence in the field of Applied Linguistics and Writing Studies. Being a pragmatist teacher, I also aspire to become a prolific teacher-researcher whose work generates noticeable implications for bringing about progressive changes in current approaches to writing curriculum design.
“For example, as I see that the current landscape in writing education does not operationalize the paradigm of multilingualism and multimodality as resources strongly enough, I hope in my future professional career, I could help advocate for transformed curriculums for multilingual writers that maximize their potential through tapping into their powerful multilingualism.”
Xu has won a Difference and Inequality Teaching Award and has served in multiple institutional and national capacities, such as a member of the Steering Committee of the Graduate Student Council (GSC) of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). Built on these experiences, Xu said her goal is to keep contributing to a more equitable and inclusive professional and academic environment.