Professor Robert (aka Bob) Cowen, a distinguished scholar in comparative education, was born in 1938 in Darlington, County Durham, England. He attended a prestigious grammar school intended to prepare scholars for the Tudor civil service but instead pursued a different path, significantly shaping the landscape of comparative education. Cowen studied at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), where he was exposed to a broad range of social sciences, including economics, the history of political thought, international law, and comparative government, laying the groundwork for his future contributions to comparative education. He trained as a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin, and began teaching and lecturing in London. His academic journey took him globally as an assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo and as a visiting professor at La Trobe University, the University of Brasilia, and the Catholic University of Leuven. At the Institute of Education, University of London, now UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, he earned both an MA and a PhD. During his four-decade tenure at the Institute of Education, Cowen became a luminary in developing academic comparative education.
Bob was a gifted educator who nurtured students' talents, encouraging them to become independent thinkers. He was deeply committed to establishing comparative education as an independent intellectual field, focusing on the complexities at the intersection of international power and domestic politics. He profoundly influenced the discourse within the field as a member and chair of the editorial board for the journal Comparative Education and through his leadership in the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) as a member of the executive committee, vice president and president.
Bob engaged with global academic communities, collaborating closely with colleagues in Europe and worldwide, including in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, and Japan. His dedication remained steadfast until his untimely death on June 13, 2023, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. At the time, he was working on a special issue: Comparative Education: Some Futures?, published posthumously in Comparative Education 59(3). His legacy endures, with his visionary scholarship continuing to shape the intellectual integrity of comparative education.
Selected publications
· Cowen, R. (2000). Comparing Futures or Comparing Pasts? Comparative Education, 36(3), 333–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/713656619
· Cowen, R. (2009). The transfer, translation, and transformation of educational processes: and their shape‐shifting? Comparative Education, 45(3), 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050060903184916
· Cowen, R. (2009). Then and Now: Unit Ideas and Comparative Education, in Cowen, R. and Kazamias, A. (Eds.), International Handbook of Comparative Education, Part Two, Chapter 79, pp. 1277-1294. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6403-6_79
· Cowen, R. (2023a) ‘Comparative education: then, now, and next’, in Tierney, R. J., Rizvi, F., Erkican, K. (Eds.), International Encyclopaedia of Education, vol. 1. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.01002-2
· Cowen, R. (2023b). Comparative education: and now? Comparative Education, 59(3), 326–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2240207