John McGowan

John McGowan, Ph.D. Director The Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities (919) 962-6831 jpm@email.unc.edu

John McGowan roamed the United States before finding a home in Chapel Hill in 1992. Raised on Long Island, he went to college at Georgetown University and earned his Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Rochester, Stanford, and the University of California at Santa Barbara in his scholar-gypsy years.

At Carolina, McGowan has served as director of the Royster Society of Fellows in The Graduate School, associate director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and founding member of the University Program in Cultural Studies.

His scholarly work has ranged widely. He has written five books, covering topics from Victorian literature to theories of postmodernism. Most recently, his work has centered on questions of what democracy can and should mean under contemporary cultural and political conditions. In that context, he has written a book on the political theorist Hannah Arendt and another on the values, principles and commitments of American Liberalism from James Madison to the present. In addition, McGowan has co-edited two books, including the massive Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, a 2,200-page tome that covers 2,500 years.

During his time at Carolina, he has won three teaching awards: the J. Carlyle Sitterson Freshman Teaching Award, an Association of English Graduate Students Mentoring Award and the Distinguished Post-Baccalaureate Teaching Award. He co-directed two National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars for college teachers, in 2001 and 1997. He also co-directed a 2000 UNC conference on "Teaching for the Public Good: The Future of the Humanities."

McGowan has addressed scholarly audiences on five continents, and spent the 2001-2002 academic year as a Visiting Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of English at the University of California, Berkeley.