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Submitted: 1/29/21 • Approved: 1/29/21 • Last Updated: 2/1/21 • R383472-G383472-S3
Dec 22, 1916 - Nov 16, 2015
Section: Mausoleum Garden
*Obituary
COWAN, Louise Louise Cowan, university teacher and nationally recognized leader in humanities education, passed away Monday, November 16, in Dallas. She was 98. Dr. Cowan taught for fifty-three years at the University of Dallas, where she was chair of the English department, dean of graduate studies, University Professor, and the first occupant of the Louise Cowan Chair in Humanities. With her husband Donald Cowan, physicist and president of the university from 1962 to 1977, she worked steadily to build an internationally recognized university with a core curriculum based in the Western classics. She and political philosopher Willmoore Kendall founded the university's Institute of Philosophic Studies, a unique combination of doctoral programs in disciplines centered on the study of core texts, and she directed its growth. The dual focus of Dr. Cowan's life--on building the good city and educating to the fullest all the members of that citywas expressed in her founding, along with her husband and four other intellectual leaders, the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1980 to bring the life of the mind into dialogue with the city. She then conceived of and initiated the Teachers Academy at the institute in 1983, a program for Dallas public school teachers that from 1984-87 was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which cited it as a "model for the nation." In July 2015 the Teachers Academy, which is now part of the larger Cowan Center for Education, conducted its 32nd consecutive Summer Institute for Teachers. For her work with this institute and her other contributions to the teaching of the classics, she received the Arete Award from the city of Dallas in 1965; the Dallas Historical Society's Award in the Humanities in 1980, and in 1991 the Charles Frankel Prize (now the National Humanities Award), the nation's highest award for work in the humanities, awarded in the White House. In 2010 she was named one of two women on the list of the 20 most brilliant living Christian professors. Born in Fort Worth, Dr. Cowan received her B.A. and M.A. from Texas Christian University and her Ph.D. in 1953 from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote her dissertation on the group of Southern poets and critics who dominated the national literary scene for several decades. She was widely recognized for the book published from her dissertation, The Fugitive Group, still considered an indispensable document for understanding the Southern Renascence that began in the 1920s. She was author also of The Southern Critics and editor of, among other volumes, Invitation to the Classics (with Os Guinness), Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority (with Donald Cowan), and The Terrain of Comedy, and general editor of the series The Genres of Literature. She was acclaimed as a teacher throughout the country and noted for her teaching of Shakespearean tragedy and comedy and twentieth-century Southern literature, as well as the novels of Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Caroline Gordon. In 2014 she spoke on Southern culture at the University of the South upon being awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters. She continued her work in teaching and lecturing through her 99th year, presenting her last lecture, on the vocation of teaching, two months ago. Her belief was that great literature (Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare) is the birthright of every American and that, as an integral part of democracy's very foundation, it provides an education necessary for all. In all, Louise Cowan's life and work in literature and teaching constituted an original, abiding contribution to American culture. She was preceded in death by her husband Donald, parents Will and Ouita Shillingburg, sister Doris Shillingburg, granddaughter Lucy, and granddaughter-in-law Aimee. She is survived by her son Bainard and his wife, Christine; grandchildren Claire Barbetti, Will, Donald, Elizabeth Wells, Michael, Veronica Phair, and Glencora Pipkin; twelve great-grandchildren; and thousands of students whose minds and hearts she won. Services will be at Christ the King Catholic Church, Dallas. In lieu of flowers, she wished that contributions be made to the Donald and Louise Cowan Scholarship Fund of the Braniff Graduate School, University of Dallas. Contributions may be made at alumni.udallas.edu/cowanmemorial.com
Published in Dallas Morning News on Nov. 18, 2015.
Photo courtesy of Annette Shaw
Contributed on 1/29/21 by hawkinsdonna48
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Record #: 383472
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