Robert Bianchi

Dr. Robert Bianchi, PhD, is an English language and linguistics specialist who teaches undergraduate courses in academic writing, linguistics, literature, and religious studies as well as MFA thesis writing at VCUarts Qatar. His research interests include online learning, religiolinguistics, language and identity, multilingualism, and corpus-based discourse analysis. His corpus of online forum messages from the now defunct Jordanian website Mahjoob.com highlighted the vitality of 3arabizi, a hybridized form of colloquial Arabic written in Latin script with arithmographemes (keyboard numerals as letters). A creative writer, Robert explores gender, class, and cross-cultural conflict in the contemporary Middle East in his first novel, 7abibi. His second novel, God’s Marine, challenges the “clash of civilizations” narrative dividing Islam and the West, highlighting shared humanity as a means of bridging ethnocultural and ideological divides. His poetry chapbook, Vagabondo: Vagaries of an Un-Italian Canadian explores themes of diasporic displacement and identity. Robert started teaching in the K-12 and Special Ed. sectors in the early 1990’s. In the mid 1990’s, he taught English at private language schools in his Canada before moving to Japan. Upon his return in 1998, he began teaching academic English to international students at York University. Subsequently, Robert taught at the post-secondary level in Oman, the UAE, and Qatar, serving as a Faculty Developer (EFL) at the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (now University of Doha for Science and Technology) between 2006 and 2011. An avid language learner, Robert has studied some fifteen different languages to various levels of mastery.