Bainard Cowan holds the Louise Cowan Chair in Literature at the University of Dallas, directs the Donald and Louise Cowan Archive and Center, and teaches English and comparative literature. He is currently at work on the significance of Virgil in the post-technological age.
Glenn Arbery received his PhD from the University of Dallas. He has taught at the University of St. Thomas in Houston; Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire; the University of Dallas (through the Dallas Institute); and Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he held the d’Alzon Chair of Liberal Education. He has been the president of Wyoming Catholic College since 2016. He has served as Director of the Teachers Academy at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and as an editor at People Newspapers in Dallas, where he won regional and national awards for his writing. In addition to numerous essays and reviews, he has published two volumes with ISI Books, Why Literature Matters (2001) and The Southern Critics (2010), editor. He is also the editor of The Tragic Abyss (2003) for the Dallas Institute Press and Augustine’s Confessions and Its Influence, St. Augustine Press (2019). His novel Bearings and Distances was published by Wiseblood Books in 2015, and his second, Boundaries of Eden, was published in 2020.
Joshua Skinner earned his MA in Philosophy and BA in English from the University of Dallas, and his JD from Ave Maria School of Law. He was a litigator in private practice for more than fifteen years before starting at the University of Dallas as Director of the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX. He now serves as Compliance Officer in the University’s Office of General Counsel.
Amber Dyer holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Dallas, where she passed her dissertation defense “with distinction” for her scholarship on Dostoevsky and Faulkner. She is a graduate faculty member at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and Senior Consultant for the Louise and Donald Cowan Center for Education, where she writes, speaks, mentors teachers, and establishes Cowan Academies of classical liberal learning in K-12 public schools. She teaches literature and philosophy at LeTourneau University and English at Dallas Baptist University. She was Louise Cowan’s final graduate assistant and mentee of almost two decades.
Kathleen Marks is Associate Professor of English, Director of Liberal Studies, and Chair of the Division of English and Speech in the Collins College of Professional Studies at St. John’s University. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Dallas. Her book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination (University of Missouri Press, 2002) explores the intersection between African-American literature and ancient Greek religion. She has written articles on classical and modern works of literature such as Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. In addition to supporting St. John’s students by teaching Introduction to Global Literature and Selected Morrison Novels, she has also developed special topics courses on Hoarding and the Medusa.
Alex Taylor is a fourth-year doctoral student in Literature at the University of Dallas’ interdisciplinary Institute of Philosophic Studies. He received his BA from the University of Dallas in History with concentrations in Medieval & Renaissance Studies and Political Philosophy. His dissertation unearths the shared political vision of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, which appears through an examination of the role played by the modern city in the form of both novels, undertaken in dialogue with the Catholic intellectual, Western literary and philosophic traditions. He is also currently collaborating with Robert Dupree to edit a book of essays written by Louise Cowan, one of the founders of the University of Dallas and the chief architect of its pioneering Literary Tradition sequence, titled The Four Genres: A Map of the Poetic Imagination. His scholarly work (on Flannery O’Connor) has appeared in the Flannery O’Connor Review (2021) and English Studies (2019). His poetry has appeared in Journal of Italian Translation, Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, and University of Dallas’ publication The Avant-Guard.