Ed Durgan is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher interested in homelessness and severe mental illness in impoverished urban settings.   His approach to this crisis leads to questions in architecture history and theory, psychiatry, and the lived world of the homeless person.  Implications for social justice are the ultimate object of his interest.

Additionally, Dr. Durgan has directed the Clemente Veterans Initiative Seattle since 2017 where works to amplify veterans’ voices through the humanities.  He is a recipient of several grants for original research and for teaching under-served populations.  He is the co-recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities grant for ‘Inflection Points’: a bridge program into undergraduate studies for US military veterans.

Dr. Durgan is a licensed mental health counselor associate in Washington state.  In his private psychotherapy practice, his approach is existential-phenomenological and he specializes in working with parents of survivors of sexual trauma, male survivors of childhood sexual trauma, as well as moral trauma, military sexual trauma, and combat-related trauma among US military veterans.

Dr. Durgan is a noted public intellectual who has lectured nationally and internationally on topics of homelessness and severe mental illness, methamphetamine psychosis, and trauma-informed pedagogy.

• Academic Director of the Clemente Veterans Initiative at AUS
• Associate faculty in the humanities and social justice.