Professor Maria Assif is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She has been highly involved in the implementation of campus-wide initiatives in Students as Partners, community-engaged learning, and global classrooms.

Professor Assif is an engaged leader in the development of pedagogical initiatives globally. She is Co-Coordinator of the Writing about Writing Steering Committee at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She is a member of the Science Committee of the Global Education Conference and one of the mentors at the Naylor Workshop (a top tier platform for undergraduate research in Writing Studies). She also serves as the Faculty Advisor of the only Canadian chapter of Sigma Tau Delta (the International English Honor Society), which she founded at UTSC.

Professor Assif is the recipient of many teaching and research awards, grants, and fellowships, including UTSC Underground Best Professor of the Year Award, U of T Community Engaged Teaching Fellowship, a U of T LEAF Seed Grant, a Co­operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada grant, a Fulbright scholarship, and the Mellon and Adrian Research Fellowships.

As a researcher, Professor Assif focuses primarily on writing studies and Arab women writers. In 2021, in collaboration with many students, local activists and Arab historians, she finished the first edition of the first critical database about Contemporary Arab Women Writing to be released digitally in 2022. She is currently working on a textbook, Beyond the Five Paragraph Essay. Professor Assif has served as Associate Editor of different journals in comparative literature, transnational studies, education, and cultural linguistics, and as a reviewer of several composition textbooks.