Welcome to my blog

Hello! I am professor of cultural studies at Cardiff University, and this is my blog.

I am actually resurrecting it after many years of neglect because I have decided it is time to leave supposedly open access but actually profit-making sites like Academia.edu and I want somewhere to post my first drafts, random ideas, hypotheses and works in progress.

I also post on Substack as well as places like ResearchGate. And of course there are links to many of my publications on my Cardiff University profile page. But a blog is a nice thing to have, I think.

If you have just bumbled here by accident and have no idea who I am: I used to write books about things like political theory. Then I wrote about film, media and popular culture. Then I wrote three books about Bruce Lee. I also spent a long time using the work of cultural theorist Rey Chow to inform my thinking on many subjects. After that, I set to work creating the interdisciplinary research nexus that is now called Martial Arts Studies. I did this via annual conferences, a journal, a book series, writing lots of articles and books, and getting a lot of help from great people along the way.

I have stepped back a bit from that now, and I am currently researching and writing about all kinds of strength training, from Indian Clubs to kettlebells to common or garden modern bodybuilding. I have started posting ideas, arguments, hypotheses and works in progress here.

If you want to find out more about my work, my Cardiff University profile is here: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/182916-bowman-paul

I will also maintain a CV here (as long as Notion remains free, that is): http://bit.ly/4mrJE1C

Enjoy!