Faculty Directory

William Bowden

Visiting Assistant Professor, Messina College

Profile

William Bowden, Ph.D., is a visiting assistant professor and faculty-in-residence in English at Messina College. His research interests include environmental aesthetics, social epistemology, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, German Idealism and East Asian culture and thought (with a concentration on postwar Korean literature and cinema). As a first-generation college student, he is committed to equity and encouraging students to pursue a path of rigor and excellence both in the classroom and in their field(s) of interest. To this end, the Jesuit principle of cura personalis has been integral to his teaching and mentorship experience across K-12 and especially under-resourced student populations.

Awards & Publications

SELECTED APPOINTMENTS AND AWARDS

(2024) Nancy Potter Graduate Critical Writing Award, Department of English, University of Rhode Island.听听

(2023) Distinguished Scholarship for The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.

PUBLICATIONS

鈥淩eading Strata; or, Traumatic Reading in David Mitchell鈥檚 Cloud Atlas,鈥 Texas Studies in Literature and Language, University of Texas Press. (Forthcoming: Fall 2026).

鈥淟ooking and the Male Gaze: Aspects of Feminist Transnationalism in Han Kang and Lauren Groff鈥檚 Rewritings of the Marriage Plot,鈥 Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies. (Forthcoming: December 2026).

Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation.鈥 Victorian Network, Special Issue: Victorian Pedagogy, September 2025.

鈥淩elational and Reparative Pedagogies: An Interview with Benjamin Hagen,鈥 Europe Now, July 2021.听

鈥淰irginia Woolf and Divergent Education in the Twenty-First Century,鈥 The Modernist Review, March 2020.听

鈥淐ollaboration, Pedagogy, and Media: Short-Term Summer Program Emphasizes Project Based and Social-Emotional Learning,鈥 Journal for Media Literacy Education 7.1, (2015) 72-76.听

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Conference Presentations

鈥淎esthetic Freedom After the Beautiful: Kafka and Klee,鈥 Panel on Hegel and Literature, Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA), Gannon University. (2026)

鈥淧lanetary Cosmopolitanisms? Translation as a problem of form in David Mitchell鈥檚 Cloud Atlas,鈥 Planetary Drifts, Centre de recherche des 猫tudes litt茅raires et culturelles sur la plan茅tarit茅, University of Montreal. (2022)

鈥淟ost in Time-Space Compression: Hari Kunzru鈥檚 Gods Without Men and the Problem of Place,鈥 Biannual Conference of The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). (2021)

鈥淓nvisioning a Post-National Aesthetic in Twenty-First-Century Literature,鈥 Annual American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference. (2021)

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