Bainard Cowan joined the University of Dallas faculty as the Cowan Chair in 2009. Animating
his teaching, writing and academic projects have been the great forms of the poetic
imagination, whose deep unity he first encountered in UD’s literary tradition course
sequence. Since then, he has sought to bring that priceless realization to as many
others as possible.
Prior to the University of Dallas, Cowan taught American and world literature at Louisiana
State University for over thirty years. There, he co-founded the Comparative Literature
Doctoral Program and co-developed a classic-core curriculum in the honors college.
From 1992 to 1997 he directed a series of summer institutes on “poetics of the Americas”
for some 100 Louisiana college teachers, supported by substantial grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the Louisiana Board of Regents. In 1984-85
he was LSU’s first visiting professor at the Université de Provence in Aix-en-Provence,
and from 2006 to 2008 he was the D’Alzon visiting professor at Assumption College.
Also a fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, he has given approximately
50 special lectures to audiences there and at colleges across the United States.
Education
B.A. in English Literature, University of Dallas, 1970
Fulbright-supported study, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, 1970-71
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1975
Academic Appointments
Louisiana State University: Instructor to Professor, 1975-2008
University of Dallas: Cowan Chair, Professor of Literature, 2009-present
Visiting positions:
University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence, 1984-85
University of Dallas, 2001
D’Alzon Visiting Professor, Assumption College, 2006-2008
Recent Courses
Undergraduate Courses: Literary Tradition 1; The European Novel; Epic Traditions of
India, China, Japan
Undergraduate/Graduate Cross-Listed Courses: Russian Novel; Literary Criticism and
Theory; Melville and Hawthorne
Graduate Courses: The Ancient World; History & Theory of the Novel; (with Dr. Robert
Wood) Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
Research Interests
The novel as a form, especially in America, Russia, France, and Germany
The Western epic from Homer to Dante
Ancient and modern critical thought
Selected Publications
Book: Exiled Waters: “Moby-Dick” and the Crisis of Allegory (LSU Press, 1982)
Selected edited books:
Poetics of the Americas (LSU Press, 1997)
Gained Horizons: Regensburg and the Enlargement of Reason (St. Augustine’s Press,
2011)
The Prospect of Lyric (Dallas Institute Publications, 2012)
Selected articles:
“Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique No. 22 (1981): 109-22
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