UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1351
COWELL, DUSTIN C.

COWELL, DUSTIN C. (1945-)
Professor of Arabic Language and Literature
At UW: 1973-

Interviewed: 	2013 (1 sessions)
Interviewer: 	Paul Beckett
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	2 hours, 16 minutes

Abstract: In his August 2013 interview with Paul Beckett, Dustin Cowell gives an overview of his over five-decade career in Arabic-language studies and teaching.  He chronicles his growing interest in language during high-school and college, eventually leading to an interest in Andalusian Arabic culture.  He then details how extensive experience in Spain, North Africa, and Egypt led him to UW-Madison’s African Languages and Literature department, from where he devoted considerable time to Sahelian and Malaysian Arabic-language cultures.  Along the way, Cowell discusses influential colleagues and administrators who were instrumental in his development and in the development of a vibrant Arabic program at UW.  This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: San Francisco Bay area, CA; Newark NJ area; Pomona College; Madrid and Grenada, Spain; Arabic language literature; University of California-San Diego; Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi; Tunisia; Cairo, Egypt; Woodrow Wilson fellowship; Edris Makward; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Menahem Mansoor; African Languages and Literature Department; Philip Curtin; Six Day War; Mauritania; Malaysia.

First Interview Session (July 23, 2013): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:47	Question: Talk about your early influences. Answer: Cowell was born June 28, 1945 in Oakland CA.  He talked about his parents, both of whom were born just around the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed his grandparents’ house. He related how his parents met, married, and had him and his older brother. When his father was asked to transfer just outside Newark NJ, the whole family moved there in 1945 [?]. This limited his family’s contact with their extended family.

00:05:58	[no question] He talked about other family members who influenced him, especially his maternal uncle whom he described as an “adventurer.” This uncle was a flying farmer, educated at UC-Davis and travelling regularly between his home in Arizona and the plains region of Canada. He related one airplane journey he took with his uncle.

00:10:02	[no question] He related his curiosity about his uncle’s work with Spanish-speaking agricultural laborers, which prompted him to decide he’d study Spanish.

00:11:20	[no question] He supposed his family’s biennial cross-country trips were influential on him, and noted that education was always valued in his family. He continued to talk about the family’s roots in California.

00:15:00	[no question] Continuing to talk about his education, he recalled his elementary education positively, though he thought he was a slow learner early on.

00:16:30	[no question] He recounted the “shock” of some stern 9th grade teachers, but his growing interest in Spanish and success in his sophomore year. Because English was his hardest subject, he always assumed he’d go into science.

00:18:12	[no question] Giving an illustration of his orientation toward science, he discussed a biology project that engrossed his interest during his sophomore year. He reminisced about writing to a scientist in NYC who studied euglena and spending part of that summer studying with him.

00:21:52	[no question] Having done well in HS, he said he sought early admission to several smaller liberal arts colleges, of which he fell in love with Pomona College. 

00:23:16	[no question] He talked about going to Pomona College, where all students were encouraged to do a semester abroad. Knowing he wanted to study Spanish, he arranged to go to Spain, taking some Spanish, literature, and also German (since he was still a science major). He said his German teacher was hard, but taught grammar in a way that stuck with him.

00:27:22	[no question] Continuing to talk about college, he recalled taking a course in cultures of E. and SE Asia during his sophomore year which captured his interest.

00:28:40	[no question] He observed that when he took his Spanish literature class, he discovered that the earliest Spanish texts were written in Arabic and read about how Arab culture had influence Spanish history. This led him to do one of his junior projects on Arab influences in Spain.

00:31:42	[no question] He reminisced about his semester in Spain, during which he started in Madrid, but was sent later to Grenada, where he worked closely with a professor of Arabic and director of the Arabic museum across from Alhambra. Through this relationship, he became more and more interested in “things Arabic” in Spain; also in Grenada, he had a more vibrant social life than before.

00:36:46	[no question] Returning to Pomona, he realized he didn’t want to be a chemistry major anymore, and explained the process of changing to a Spanish major. He also recalled being intrigued by the teaching method of his French professor.

00:39:22	[no question] After graduation, he said, he pursued a degree in Spanish and Arabic and got a National Defense Foreign Languages grant (now FLAS) to do so. He discovered a professor at UC-San Diego who was teaching Spanish and Arabic, so he went there, but began taking Arabic at Princeton during the summer of his first year. He recounted the course of his Arabic and Spanish studies at San Diego, Los Angeles and Berkeley (as his professor moved around).

00:45:30	[no question] He explained how he moved to the comparative literature section of the dept at UCSD because his dissertation project was going to be the poetry of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi, the court poet of the first caliph of Cordoba. He reflected on the disciplinary boundaries between literatures in different languages, which were difficult to cross even at UW and made Comp Lit valuable.

00:49:06	[no question] He discussed studying Arabic abroad in Iraq, Tunisia and Cairo, Egypt.  He had met an Iraqi Arabic teacher at Princeton who spoke to him only in Arabic, though his experience at Berkeley had not been as positive, since the teacher didn’t think Americans could master Arabic. In 1970 he studied in Tunisia, which was a formative experience for him, speaking Arabic only with his friends and learning how to pronounce some of the more difficult sounds in the language.

00:56:19	[no question] He explained how he got interested in communities of Muslim Andalusian refugees from the 17th century in Tunisia (one of which was called “the fortress of al-Andalus), and did a project on it. He recounted travelling to the village, visiting the local shaykh who’d written a history of the village, and returned to the village on numerous occasions afterward.

01:03:22	[no question] In addition to travelling to the “fortress of al-Andalus,” he said he also traveled around Tunisia, to Morocco, Algeria and back to Spain. So when he went to Cairo, he’d “already had some experience of the world.”

01:06:33	[no question] Cowell discussed his trip to Cairo in 1971, a tense time for Egypt. He recounted how after walking around town, a local man submitted him to the police, after which he was interrogated in detail, but released. Thereafter, however, he was hampered from wandering as liberally as he would have liked due to restrictions on picture-taking, etc, but the program was good.

01:09:40	[no question] After coursework for one semester, he worked on his thesis in Cairo. He recalled his living arrangement, courses and teachers he met while doing this, including professors of ‘Abbasid literature and history. After the first year, he was invited to be a Woodrow Wilson fellow, which allowed him to continue friendships, be immersed in the culture and language, and get an apartment in the city.

01:14:14	[no question] Cowell detailed looking for a job after graduate school. He applied to every university he knew that taught Arabic. He got a response from Edris Makward, but it wasn’t until he was presenting a paper in Paris in July 1973 that he learned from his parents that Lyndon Harries (UW’s dept chair) was trying to contact him about the job. Sight unseen, he was offered a 3-year tenure track contract to teach Arabic.

01:20:26	Question: You’d been told by Makward that there wasn’t a position? Answer: Yes; Arabic had been taught in Hebrew and Semitic studies since the mid-1950s by Egyptian-born Manehem Mansoor, but Vansina and Curtin had convinced him in 1972 that Arabic should be taught through African studies, but had not been able to retain the original professor slated to teach Arabic the first year. So since his letter was on file, Cowell was offered the job.

01:23:11	[no question] Cowell quipped about details of his first year at UW—Dean Kleene, his arrival almost immediately from Cairo/Tunis, financial hardship waiting for his first paycheck, and his first home in Madison. He had 12 students in his Arabic classes, which he remembered being tough.

01:27:19	[no question] He recalled some specific figures from African studies at the time—Curtin, Harold Scheub, Phil Noss, Patrick Bennett, Dan Kunene, Neil Skinner, and others.

01:28:31	[no question] He reflected on the 6 Day War in October 1973, just after he’d arrived on campus in an environment that was very pro-Israel.

01:30:02	Question: Fallout from Arabic being moved into African Languages and Literature? Answer: He said his only contact with the other departments was with Menahem Mansoor, who was very cordial. He didn’t think there was animosity, though there was some tension. Courses generally remained the same and there wasn’t a lot of crossover between these department; further, in the early years there was a preponderance of graduate, rather than undergraduate, students.

01:35:02	[no question] Cowell addressed the issue of tenure, remarking that he never had a faculty mentor other than that got to know Fannie LeMoine through a mutual friendship with the Libyan scholar at UW. He remembered the process not being as specific as it is now, but being clear—specifically, he remembered being encouraged to spend time writing and also expanding the Arabic program.

01:37:33	[no question] He detailed how he worked to expand the program by opening more levels to more students, offering the Egyptian dialect, and teaching Arabic literature.

01:40:59	[no question] He explained how he “moved [his] research south” since he was now part of the dept of African Languages and Literature. Having been put in contact with someone from Mauritania who needed an Arabic-language scholar to study the local dialect, he applied for a Fulbright grant for 1977 to do so.

01:44:51	[no question] Continuing to talk about his research in Mauritania, he explained how a local radio station had collected poems from the countryside, from which he learned the dialect and got interested in African Arabic.

01:45:07	[no question] He observed that he interviewed in 1980 to be the director of the American University in Cairo’s onsite director of the Program for Advanced Study of Arabic Abroad. This occurred during a tense time in Egypt, but was also very productive in making connections as a scholar and teacher.

01:47:42	[no question] In 1989-90, he took his sabbatical in Mauritania and Egypt, and continued to go to Mauritania every summer.

01:48:31	Question: When did your interest in Southeast Asia develop? Answer: Cowell explained that he ended up teaching many Malays on fellowship at UW, particularly in the 1980s. He talked about how these students learned to write Arabic script beautifully, though their knowledge of grammar was often lacking. 

01:52:05	[no question] One of Cowell’s students particularly was closely associated to a Malaysian Islamic scholar who founded International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization. This young man brought Cowell in to expand their Arabic program. He reflected on how this move had taken him away from the Arab world, but brought him into contact with a wide scholarly circle of languages that had interaction with Arabic.

01:57:49	Question: After coming back? Answer: Cowell talked about serving as chair of AL&L for three terms, observing that it was difficult at times to balance the job. He discussed how different languages in the department fared, and were treated by upper administration. He discussed different professors and chronicled the growing respect for Arabic-language studies.

02:04:41	Question: Graduate v. Undergraduate study? Answer: Cowell observed that undergraduate enrollment had far surpassed graduate enrollment as foreign language grew in stature. The challenge was that Arabic takes a lot of time to learn effectively.

02:07:21	Question: Plans moving forward? Answer: He said he was working on a book on lyric poetry. He was also planning on doing some teaching and consulting in Niger.

02:11:21	Question: Anything else? Answer: Cowell credited administrators with being enthusiastic about creating the Arabic immersion program that is now one of only two immersion programs in the US. He also talked about students he’d been proud to teach in his years.

02:16:36	End of First Interview Session

End of Oral History #1351