Nick Bowman

Nick Bowman teaches courses on the user experience of immersive and interactive media and advises student research projects.

Prior to joining the Newhouse School, Bowman was a tenured associate professor at two other research institutions: Texas Tech University from 2019-22 and West Virginia University form 2011-19. At both institutions, he was chiefly responsible for developing coursework focused on media psychology and the uses and effects of emerging media, such as social media, video games and extended reality technologies. He also holds ongoing faculty appointments at Universidad Panamericana Guadalajara in Mexico, The Games Institute at the University of Waterloo in Canada and National Chengchi University (國立政治大學) in Taiwan.

Bowman’s research is broadly focused on understanding cognitive, emotional, physical and social demands of interactive media content. This work considers the functional role of media content, especially entertainment media, and investigates how and why we integrate media into our daily lives—from serving as spaces for informal learning to providing short-term psychological well-being and mood management. He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed manuscripts and authored or contributed to more than 250 conference presentations, along with several dozen book chapters and other writings. He has also co-authored two textbooks on media psychology and emerging media, and edited several research and theory anthologies—the most recent being "Entertainment Media and Communication" (DeGruyter, 2024) and "Emerging Technologies: Theories, Futures, Provocations" (Peter Lang, 2024). 

Recently funded projects include being named Fulbright Taiwan Wu Jing-Jyi Arts & Culture Fellow in Spring 2020, where he collaborated with scholars in Taipei to teach two courses on media psychology and interactive media effects, and conduct research into the user experience of virtual reality exergames as well as broad media usage patterns among Taiwanese adolescents. He still works closely with the Fulbright Scholars Program as a member of the national screening committee in the United States, as well as working with potential Fulbright scholars at SU.

In addition to a Fulbright, Bowman has earned several awards for teaching, including an Excellence in Graduate Education Award in 2025; an Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Communication Association Mass Communication Division in 2016; and a university-wide teaching award from West Virginia University in 2015. He is the launch editor of Global Perspectives in Communication, after ending a six-year run as the editor-in-chief of Journal of Media Psychology. Prior to that, he was editor-in-chief for Communication Research Reports from 2017-2019.

Bowman earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2010 and a M.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2004, both in communication studies. He earned a B.A. in 2003 from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he studied journalism and mass communication.