J. D. Bowers is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Secondary Teacher Certification program in History and Social Sciences.
He earned his Ph.D. in American History from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2003. His teaching and research interests include religion, genocide and human rights, the role of the US in the World, global studies and social studies curriculum development. Professor Bowers was a high school history and social studies teacher for five and a half years at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia and a foreign exchange program with St. Catherine's School in Montevideo, Uruguay.
He is the recipient of several teaching awards and grants including a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson/Carnegie Foundation for the improvement of history teaching and as a partner in several Teaching American History Grants. He is also the Director of the Genocide and Human Rights Institute and its summer program for teachers, the Roger W. Smith Genocide and Human Rights Summer Institute.
He is the author of Joseph Priestley and the English Influence on American Unitarianism, published in 2007 by Penn State University Press, a chapter on Hawaiian statehood in The Uniting States (2003) and a number of other articles and encyclopedia entries on religious figures, human rights, and genocide. He is currently writing a book on the influence of religion on the development of American human rights policies between 1890 and 1925 as well as another project on the Turkish Cypriot community.
In 2008 Professor Bowers was elected to the Editorial Board of Pennsylvania History journal and also became co-editor, with Peter Hughes, of the Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary.