Visiting Assistant Professor, Messina College
Telephone: 617-552-1027
Email: william.bowden@bc.edu
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.
(2024) Nancy Potter Graduate Critical Writing Award, Department of English, University of Rhode Island.
(2023) Distinguished Scholarship for The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.
“Reading Strata; or, Traumatic Reading in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, University of Texas Press. (Forthcoming: Fall 2026).
“Looking and the Male Gaze: Aspects of Feminist Transnationalism in Han Kang and Lauren Groff’s Rewritings of the Marriage Plot,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies. (Forthcoming: December 2026).
“Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation.” Victorian Network, Special Issue: Victorian Pedagogy, September 2025.
“Relational and Reparative Pedagogies: An Interview with Benjamin Hagen,” Europe Now, July 2021.
“Virginia Woolf and Divergent Education in the Twenty-First Century,” The Modernist Review, March 2020.
“Collaboration, Pedagogy, and Media: Short-Term Summer Program Emphasizes Project Based and Social-Emotional Learning,” Journal for Media Literacy Education 7.1, (2015) 72-76.
Conference Presentations
“Aesthetic Freedom After the Beautiful: Kafka and Klee,” Panel on Hegel and Literature, Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA), Gannon University. (2026)
“Planetary Cosmopolitanisms? Translation as a problem of form in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” Planetary Drifts, Centre de recherche des ètudes littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité, University of Montreal. (2022)
“Lost in Time-Space Compression: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men and the Problem of Place,” Biannual Conference of The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). (2021)
“Envisioning a Post-National Aesthetic in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Annual American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference. (2021)