Nahal Akbari is an Assistant Professor of Persian and Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is the director of the Persian Undergraduate Language
Program, the Persian Flagship, and the Inventive Summer Language Institute at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC). She has a PhD in Second Language Teaching and Learning from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She has been leading and contributing to various teacher training workshops and collaborative projects in instructional materials development, assessment, and program evaluation at different institutions of higher education across the US and internationally. She has published articles and book chapters on Persian pedagogy, second language writing, and discourse analysis. Her research interests include intercultural rhetoric, second language writing and the development of Interactional
Competence. She serves as a reviewer for the Journal of Second Language Writing and was the President of the American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP) from 2022 to 2024.