Mike Alvarez

M. F. Alvarez (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst) is Associate Professor of Communication. His research examines communication about mortality and suicide in a variety of representational contexts. He is the author of The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity: Authentications of Human Existence (Lexington Books, 2020), and Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (Routledge, 2023), which won top book awards at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN). He is also lead author of Pandemic Death Discourse: Denial, Disparity and the Promise of Communication (McFarland, 2025) and lead editor of Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe (Bristol University Press, 2026). In addition to these books, he has published journal articles, book chapters, and review essays in a wide array of scholarly outlets, as well as film, literary, and media criticism for general interest audiences. 

Dr. Alvarez is the recipient of an Early Career Award from the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (IAANI); an Outstanding Creative Project/Performance Award from the National Communication Association (NCA), Asian/Pacific American Studies Division; and the prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. He has previously served on NCA's Mental Health and Communication Taskforce and is a founding member and inaugural Pedagogy/Andragogy Chair of NCA's Death and Dying Division. He is also on the editorial boards of five scholarly journals: Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Autoethnography, Mortality, and Communication Teacher. 

Dr. Alvarez is currently working on several book projects, including an edited collection of personal narratives on surviving suicide, and a monograph on suicide in the digital age. The latter investigates the discursive architecture of online suicide forums, the meanings interactionally created by users, and their implications for research, therapeutic practice, and ethical UX design. Dr. Alvarez teaches courses on death and dying, interpersonal communication, film and media studies, and autoethnography.