Mike F. Alvarez, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH
Email: mike.alvarez@unh.edu

M. F. Alvarez is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, where he teaches courses in mental health and end of life communication, film and media studies, and autoethnography. Broadly speaking, his research examines communication about mortality and suicide in various representational contexts, from popular culture to online forums to personal narratives. He is especially committed to deconstructing pathological notions of social and relational being and foregrounding visceral ways of theorizing and knowing that are rooted in the body.

Dr. Alvarez is the author of The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity: Authentications of Human Existence (Lexington, 2020) and Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (Routledge, 2023), which received the 2024 Qualitative Book Award from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and the 2026 Outstanding Book Award from the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (IAANI). He is also the lead author of Pandemic Death Discourse: Denial, Disparity and the Promise of Communication (McFarland), and lead editor of Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe (Bristol University Press, 2026).

Collectively, his books have been reviewed in Omega: Journal of Death & Dying, Journal of Autoethnography, Journal of Loss & Trauma, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Mortality, Death Studies, The Qualitative Report, and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. He has also received an IAANI Early Career Award, an Outstanding Creative Project Award from the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Asian/Pacific American Studies Division, and the prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, which recognizes immigrants who are poised to make lasting contributions to American society.

Dr. Alvarez is a founding member of NCA’s Death and Dying Division and previously served as its Pedagogy/Andragogy Chair. In that role, he created the Death Education Archive, a publicly accessible repository of pedagogical resources. Dr. Alvarez is also on the editorial board of Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication Teacher. Prior to life in academia, he briefly served as a residential counselor and crisis line operator, the program coordinator of an eating disorders clinic, and the associate editor of a literary journal (in addition to a PhD in Communication, he has an MFA in Creative Writing).