
Email: mhbowker@buffalo.edu
Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Program
College of Arts and Sciences
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Buffalo, NY 14260 USA
For media inquiries (interviews, etc.), please feel free to contact me directly by email, or contact SUNY-Buffalo’s Division of University Communications at dellacon@buffalo.edu.
I teach courses in Political Theory, Psychoanalytic Social Theory, Political Psychology, Critical Thinking, Ethics, Democratic Politics, Intercultural Communication, Undergraduate (Thesis) Research, and Analytical Writing.
For twenty years, I have designed, taught, managed, and assessed courses in interdisciplinary, core-curricular, and general-education environments.
I pursue an active research program both in my area of specialization — psychoanalytic political theory — and in pedagogy / the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), with a particular emphasis on the facilitation of critical thinking.
My approach to psychoanalytic political theory may be fairly described as “ideology-critique,” which is to say that I am most interested in identifying the collective beliefs, assumptions, and fantasies that shape socio-political landscapes, and subjecting them to (what I hope to be) illuminating (and typically immanent) critique.
I serve in a number of editorial, advisory, and leadership capacities in my field(s): as Founding Editor of Routledge’s book series: Psychoanalytic Political Theory, as Editor (N. America) of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies, as Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, and more.
My published and forthcoming books are:
- The Approachable Mark (Punctum Books, Forthcoming, 2024)
- Getting Lost: Psycho-Political Withdrawal and the Covidian Era (with Amy Buzby, Eds., Phoenix Publishing House, Forthcoming, 2023)
- Oblation— Essays, Parables, and Paradoxes. (Punctum Books, Forthcoming, 2023).
- The Quiet Transgression of Being: Poems in Three Volumes. Contemplated House. (2022)
- Gorgeous Ape Thugs: The Mundane and the Graceful, vol. 3. In: The Quiet Transgression of Being. (2022)
- Sublimest Grottoes: The Idea of Mystery, vol. 2. In: The Quiet Transgression of Being. (2022).
- Exsanguinous Chords: On Anxiety / Writing, vol. 1. In: The Quiet Transgression of Being. (2022)
- Pierre Delion on Psycho-Politics: ‘What is Institutional Psychotherapy?’ and ‘The Republic of False Selves’ . Translated and Introduced by M.H. Bowker. (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022)
- The Angels Won’t Help You: Essays (Punctum Books, 2022)
- The Anguished and the Enchanted (Punctum Books, 2021)
- Critical Thinking and the Subject of Inquiry: Capacities, Resilience, and Power – A Guide for Teachers, Learners, and Trainers (Kendall Hunt, 2019)
- The Destroyed World and the Guilty Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Culture and Politics (with D.P. Levine, Phoenix Publishing House, 2019)
- Translated in Italian as La fantasia del mondo distrutto. Uno studio psicoanalitico su cultura e politica
- Misinterest: Essays, Pensées, and Dreams (Punctum Books, 2019)
- A Dangerous Place to Be: Identity, Conflict, and Trauma in Higher Education (with D.P. Levine, Routledge, 2018)
- D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject (Eds., with Amy Buzby, Palgrave, 2017)
- Ideologies of Experience: Trauma, Failure, Deprivation, and the Abandonment of the Self (Routledge, 2016)
- Escargotesque, or, What is Experience? (Punctum Books, 2015)
- Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity: Albert Camus, Postmodernity, and the Survival of Innocence (Routledge, 2014)
- Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd: Ambivalence, Resistance, and Creativity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
- Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing (Punctum Books, 2012)
I have published about forty papers in refereed journals — such as Organisational and Social Dynamics, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, the Journal of Psychosocial Studies, Free Associations, and Thought and Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal — and in several edited volumes.
I am a Fulbright Grant Recipient and, in May – June 2018, hosted a series of faculty workshops, student seminars, train-the-trainer sessions aimed at enhancing, embedding, and assessing ‘twenty-first century’ learning skills and critical thinking in curricula and extra-curricular programs at the Singapore Institute of Management.
I am the 2014 recipient of the Medaille College “Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scholarship Award” and have received multiple nominations as the Student Government Association’s “Professor of the Year” and TRiO’s Students’ Choice for “Outstanding Faculty Member.”
In the summers of 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2012, and 2008, I served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Singapore Institute of Management, where I taught courses in psychology, politics, and philosophy.
From 2003 to 2006, I served as Associate Director and Assistant Director of the International Studies Program at the University of Maryland’s nationally-acclaimed residential and experiential learning program, College Park Scholars.