Suriati Abas

Suriati Abas, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Reading and Literacy Education in the Department of Learning and Teaching. Before undertaking doctoral studies in the United States, Dr. Abas spent a decade as an elementary/middle school teacher in Singapore, an experience that continues to ground her research in the realities of classroom practice.

Dr. Abas’s research examines the ways teachers and students make meaning through critical multimodal, community-based, and digital literacies, with particular attention to multilingual learners and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Her work includes close analysis of meaning-making in picturebooks and graphic novels, and she is developing new work on teachers’ engagement with generative AI in reading, composing, and instructional decision-making. As a DEFCon Teaching Fellow with the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a national Mellon-funded initiative supporting social justice-engaged digital humanities in ethnic studies, she developed and presented a graduate-level course on children’s and young adult literature grounded in this work.

Dr. Abas partners with schools, libraries, and community organizations to connect her research to practice. Prior to joining Rutgers, she was an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta, where she co-directed the Leatherstocking Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

• Expertise & Research Interest
  • Critical multimodal literacy
  • Linguistic landscapes
  • Children’s and young adult literature
  • Culturally sustaining pedagogy
  • Multilingual learners
  • Digital and AI literacy in education
  • Teacher education

  Dr. Abas’s research examines how meaning is made across multimodal, digital, and community-based literacies, and how that meaning-making can support more equitable, identity-centered teaching.

  This work spans close analysis of literacy texts, including picture books, graphic novels, and linguistic landscapes and their construction of culture and identity, alongside a specific focus on the representation of Muslim characters and communities in children’s and young adult literature. She also studies how teachers translate this critical, multimodal lens into classroom practice, particularly through their engagement with generative AI in reading, composing, and instructional decision-making.

• Honors & Awards
  • Children’s Literature Assembly (CLA) Research Award, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)-CLA (2024)
  • Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) Scholar, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2023, 2025)
  • Divergent Award for Excellence in Implementation of Literacy in a Digital Age, Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age (2022)
• Publications

  DeHart, J.D., Abas, S., Pyles, D., & Mora, R. (Eds.). (2025). Reimagining literacy in the age of artificial intelligence: Theory and practice. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

  Abas, S. (2025). When AI literacy meets computational creativity: Vignettes of a pre-service teacher’s journey with generative AI. In J. DeHart, S. Abas, A. M. Raul, & D. Pyles (Eds.), Reimagining literacy in the age of artificial intelligence: Theory and practice (pp. 73–91). Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

  Abas, S. (2025). Teaching true stories: Expanding global perspectives through collaborative visual narratives in young adult literature classrooms. The ALAN Review, 53(1).

  Abas, S. (2025). Navigating book censorship in early childhood: A visual documentation of Pose/Wobble/Flow in action [Multimodal essay]. Early Childhood Education Assembly (ECEA) Perspectives and Provocations, 13.

  Abas, S. (2023). Critical multimodal literacy practices in student-created comics. Literacy, 57(2), 161–170.

  Abas, S. (2022). Pursuing a literacy research in precarious times. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 31(1–2), 189–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2021.1967773 

  Abas, S., Bamanger, E., Khalid, A., & Arguler, A. (2021). Navigating the land of opportunities as Muslim immigrants: A geocriticism perspective to transnationalism in multicultural children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 47(2), 47–59.

• Connect

  LinkedIn