Dr. Alina Gharabegian received her Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She brings to the American University of Armenia (AUA) 26 years of teaching and academic leadership experience across institutions of higher education in California, New York, and New Jersey.  She has taught at several of the City University of New York campuses, including City College, Queens College, and Baruch College.  Prior to joining AUA, Dr. Gharabegian was a professor in the English Department at New Jersey City University, where she has been teaching since 2009 and where she served as department chair from 2014-17. In the 2018-19 academic year, on a Fulbright scholarship, she served as the interim dean of AUA’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.  

Dr. Gharabegian’s primary training is in 19th-century British literature, with particular interest in Victorian and Romantic poetry and poetics and in the religious prose of the Victorian period.  Her secondary specialization is in composition/rhetoric theory and pedagogy.  Her scholarly interests include the elegy as a genre and poetic representations of the East/West divide. More recently, she has turned her attention to her creative work in the form of creative nonfiction and lyric essays. Her scholarly and creative essays can be found in print journals, collections, and online.