The Historian’s Life of Joseph Dowling

Joseph A. Dowling III (1926-2011), Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Lehigh University and a former member of the Editorial Board of Clio’s Psyche, died last December 21 after a long period of ill health that included prostate cancer and an arthritic hip. He was well known as an intelligent, knowledgeable, humorous, and friendly historian who taught at Lehigh from 1957 until his retirement in 1994. For a number of years, he was an active member of the International Psychohistorical Association, who readily lent his name to be a member of the Editorial Board of the fledgling Clio’s Psyche in 1994.

Dowling’s life started in poverty-stricken Clydebank, Scotland as an only child of a Scottish mother and an Irish-born father, a soldier in the Royal Scots Fusiliers who died when his son was seven years old. His mother immigrated to the United States but sent her son back to her Scottish family to be cared for while she worked in her new country. In 1940, Dowling was part of the British child evacuation in the face of German bombs and a threatened invasion; his evacuation would eventually be permanent. Joseph graduated from high school in Point Pleasant, New Jersey and spent two years at college prior to be being drafted into the U.S. Army immediately after the end of World War II. He earned his bachelor’s degree cum laude from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee (1948) and his MA (1951) and PhD (1957) from New York University. His specialty was American studies and 19^th century American history. His early teaching positions were at Shorter College in Georgia and Bates in Maine. At Lehigh, he was an active part of the life of the college and of faculty governance; twice he functioned as chair of the history department. In addition, Professor Dowling served on the Pennsylvania Council of the Humanities as well as the Pennsylvania and American Historical Associations.

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Joseph Dowling saw himself as more of a teacher than a scholar. However, he did publish some articles on William Dean Howells and a few others, including “Psychoanalysis and History: Problems and Applications,” in the Psychoanalytic Review 59, #3 (1972) and “Millennialism and Psychology,” in the History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 5, #1 (1977). At Lehigh, he received the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Christian and Mary Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Two awards are now offered in the Lehigh history department in his honor: the Dowling Best Teaching Assistant Award and the Dowling Dissertation Award. He is also remembered for being extremely sociable as well as a lifelong atheist and socialist.

After being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium in 1988, he created a Lehigh study abroad program in this Medieval European city. In fact, not long after the death of his wife Sylvia in 2001, he moved to Leuven because he loved the European university setting, enjoyed associating with young people, and wanted to get away from family problems. As a consequence of his declining health and limited mobility, his daughter Kathryn Borten brought him home only months before his death. He wrote his unpublished autobiography, My Journey, which may be available from Katie at ktborten@aol.com. On January 7, 2012, there was a “Celebration of the Life of Joseph Dowling” in Bethlehem, PA. Predeceased by one of his sons as well as his wife, he is survived by two daughters, one son, and eight grandchildren.

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