Alfie Bown is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology in the Department of Digital Humanities. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, digital media and popular culture.

His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics.

He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series and is a writer/producer for The Magician's Niece.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

Alfie supervises PhD students on psychoanalysis, the gig economy, labour and work, film and video games.

Expertise and Public Engagement

As well as academic writing, his journalism also appears in: The Paris Review, The Guardian, New Statesman, Newsweek, The Independent, The LA Review of Books, Tribune, Jacobin, etc.

Selected Publications

• Alfie Bown, Post-Comedy (London: Polity, 2024)
• Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: Capitalism and the Gamification of Relationships (London: Pluto, 2022)
• Alfie Bown, In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
• Alfie Bown, The PlayStation Dreamworld (London: Polity, 2017)
• Alfie Bown, Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Washington: Zero Books, 2015)