Rate My Professor Paul Bowker

Dr. Paul Bowker is an Assistant Lecturer in European Languages in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts at Monash University. His academic background includes studying Spanish and Latin American Studies at The University of Auckland, where he taught Spanish and tutored in European Studies from 2004 and completed his PhD in 2010, funded by doctoral scholarships from the Regueiro-McKelvie Foundation and the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand’s Bright Future Top Achiever scheme. Prior to joining Monash in June 2012, he held a fixed-term lecturing position in the Spanish Program at Victoria University of Wellington, following a four-year period in the UK that involved extensive travel in Spain and teaching English in the Canary Islands. Bowker specializes in Spanish and Latin American Studies, with research focused on Transatlantic Studies—the comparative analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Peninsular and Latin American literatures and cultural flows between Spain and its former colonies. His interests encompass travel, migration, immigration, national and transnational identity formation, power dynamics in cultural and intellectual contacts, Spain's literary responses to its post-1898 imperial loss, and representations of each other by Spain and Latin America.

At Monash, Bowker supervises PhD and honors projects on Spanish and Latin American literature and culture of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, particularly those examining the impacts of travel, migration, immigration, and transnational encounters on subjectivity and identity. He serves as an Associate Investigator on the faculty seed-funded project 'Decolonising and Indigenising European Languages at Monash University: Professional Development of Educators,' commencing August 2024, and coordinates honors in European Languages and Cultures. His key publications include 'The P.R.omised land: New Italians in Australia' (2023), 'Race, regeneration and the challenge to Spanish ideological imperialism in Jose Maria Albinana Sanz's Bajo el cielo mejicano' (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2015), 'In Praise of the Melting Pot: Argentina as Transformative Space in the Travels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez' (2014, in Other Encounters: European Writers and Gender in Transnational Context), and 'Refiguring North and South: The Grotesque of Almería in Juan Goytisolo’s Campos de Níjar and La Chanca' (2011, in Encrucijadas históricas de la España contemporánea). He has supervised theses such as 'A Chorus of Laughing People: Bakhtin’s Subversive Voices in Tirant lo Blanch' (MA, Monash, 2016, co-supervisor).