Mike Alvarez

M. F. Alvarez (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst) is Assistant Professor of Communication. His research examines communication about death and dying 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 the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry's (ICQI) Qualitative Book Award. 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 four books, he has published journal articles, book chapters, and review essays in a wide variety 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's (NCA) Asian/Pacific American Studies Division and Caucus, and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. He has previously served on NCA's Mental Health and Communication Taskforce and is a founding member and current Pedagogy/Andragogy Chair of NCA's Death and Dying Division. He is also on the editorial boards of three scholarly journals: Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare, Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication Teacher. 

Dr. Alvarez is currently working on two new book projects: an edited collection of personal narratives on suicidality and suicide bereavement, and a monograph on online communication about suicide. 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 in mental health communication, end of life communication, language and social interaction, film and media studies, and autoethnography.