Marie-Louise Paulesc

Marie-Louise Paulesc is a Teaching Professor of Communication and Faculty Head of Languages & Cultures in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University's Downtown Phoenix campus.

Dr. Paulesc's teaching in Communication moves between the cultural and critical—how meaning is produced and contested through media and public discourse—and the applied, focusing on how people use communication to lead, collaborate, and navigate professional and global contexts. Her courses engage public memory, popular culture, propaganda, and leadership and team communication, ranging from foundational classes to upper-division and interdisciplinary offerings. More recently, she co-developed and co-taught two iterations of a Humanities Lab on misinformation—one focused on the Arizona context, one on low- and no-connectivity areas—and created a leadership communication course for the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Born and raised in Bucharest, she came of age during the 1989 Romanian revolution—an experience that continues to shape her lifelong engagement with communication and her preoccupation with public memory. Her research explores our living relationships with the past, tracing how individual and collective memories—stubborn, contested, and never quite finished—thread through public life, its discourses, artifacts, spaces, and everyday practices.

As Faculty Head, Dr. Paulesc leads Languages & Cultures, a faculty group on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus that houses the Communication BA and minor, the Spanish for the Professions certificate, and shares responsibility for the General Studies BA, while also delivering First-Year Composition and courses in Communication, English, Spanish, Philosophy, Religion, and History serving students on the Downtown campus and across the university. Embedded in the life of Downtown Phoenix, the group extends its work beyond the classroom through initiatives like the Humanities Lecture Series. In this context, she supports faculty in their work as teachers and scholars, guides and coordinates curriculum and program development, and cultivates connections with university and community partners.