SCHOLARSHIP
Complementing my work as a visual artist and interdisciplinary scholar, I have worked as a professor in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, Teachers College since 2011. I co-founded the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Project in 2012 with Drs. Aurélie Athan and Riddhi Sandil. This was a NY-State approved graduate-level advanced certificate program that offered cutting edge clinical and research training. We sundowned the program in 2026 to focus on other ventures.
Research is inherently collaborative and throughout the years I have had the opportunity to work with truly incredible student and faculty collaborators via my research team, identityLORE. Historically, most of our work centered on issues of marginalization, stigma, and discrimination (i.e., “minority stress”) and how these experiences impact mental health and well-being. Many of the publications from this program of research speak to unique issues related to queerness, secularism, and other ‘disruptive’ states of being. A common thread in this work is measurement development and evaluation—such efforts are an acknowledgement that most of our tools for testing and building theories in psychology have been woefully inadequate and laden with biases.
In more recent years, I have broadened my focus to queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009) and its possibilities for new ways of being in the world: relationally, politically, and temporally. My thinking is regularly informed by work on chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010), monster studies (Halberstam, 2020; Stryker, 2024), necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019), and contemporary existentialism (Hägglund, 2020). I am on sabbatical for the 2025-2026 academic year to work through several projects on these topics; I am not accepting new doctoral students for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Selected Publications
My full academic CV is here.
Available for purchase via Columbia University Press
This collection features more than two dozen narratives by atheists from different backgrounds across the United States. Ranging in age, race, sexual orientation, and religious upbringing, these individuals address deconversion, community building, parenting, and romantic relationships, providing a nuanced look at living without a god in a predominantly Christian nation.
These narratives illuminate the complexities and consequences for nonbelievers in the United States. Stepping away from religious belief can have serious social and existential ramifications, forcing atheists to discover new ways to live meaningfully without a religious community. Yet shedding the constraints of a formal belief system can also be a freeing experience. Ultimately, this volume shows that claiming an atheist identity is anything but an act isolated from the other dimensions of the self. Upending common social, political, and psychological assumptions about atheists, this collection helps carve out a more accepted space for this minority within American society.
Brewster, M. E., & Snow, O. (2022). Childfree Minority Stress: Considerations for Life at the Margins of Adulthood. In D. Thornley (Ed.), Childfree across the disciplines. Rutgers University Press.
Brewster, M. E., & Lopez-Molina, D. A. (2021). Centering matrices of domination: Steps toward a more intersectional vocational psychology. Journal of Career Assessment, 29(4), 547-569.
Brewster, M. E., Velez, B. L., Geiger, E., & Sawyer, J. S. (2020). It’s like herding cats: Atheist minority stress, group involvement, and psychological outcomes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 67(1), 1-13.
Brewster, M. E., Soderstrom, B., Esposito, J. Breslow, A., Geiger, E., Caso, T., Arango, S., Foster, A., Sandil, R., Morshedian, N., Sawyer, J., & Cheng, J. (2017). A content analysis of scholarship on consensual nonmonogamies: Methodological roadmaps, current themes, and directions for future research. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, 6(1), 32-47.
Brewster, M. E., Hammer, J., Sawyer, J., Eklund, A., & Palamar, J. (2016). Perceived experiences of atheist discrimination: Instrument development and evaluation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(5), 557-570.
Brewster, M. E., Moradi, B., DeBlaere, C., & Velez, B.L. (2013). Navigating the borderlands: Cognitive flexibility, bicultural self-efficacy, and minority stress in the lives of bisexual individuals. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(4), 543-556.
Brewster, M. E., & Moradi, B. (2010). Perceived anti-bisexual prejudice experiences: Scale development and evaluation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57(4), 451-468.