Bio

José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), then as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). He now runs Bowen Innovation Group L.L.C., and does innovation, pedagogy and D&I consulting and training in both higher education and for Fortune 500 companies including AT&T, Chevron, Pfizer, Toyota, and Walmart.

As a scholar, Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University (in Chemistry, Music, and Humanities), has written over 100 scholarly articles, was editor of the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), and an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011). He received a National Endowment for theHumanities Fellowship and has a TED talk on Beethoven as Bill Gates. In 2010, Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar.

Bowen is a musician and has appeared on five continents as a jazz pianist and conductor with Stan Getz,Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. His compositions include a symphony (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), and music for Jerry Garcia.

Bowen has long been a pioneer in education, classroom design and technology, featured in The New YorkTimes, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, PBS News Hour,and on NPR (an extended media list is here). He was given a Stanford Centennial Award for UndergraduateTeaching in 1990 and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 300 campuses and conferences in 46 states and 17 countries around the world.

His books on teaching include Teaching Naked (2012) winner of the Ness Award for Best Book on HigherEducation from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the sequel, Teaching NakedTechniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes with C. Edward Watson (2017) and Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection(2021, Johns Hopkins University Press). His latest book with C. Edward Watson is Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2024, Johns Hopkins University Press).

For more, see his website teachingnaked.com or his education TED talks.

In 2018 he received the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education) from the New American Colleges and Universities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in England, is currently a Senior Fellow at the Association of American of Colleges and Universities.

 

Alternative Bios (Academic, Business or Shorter)

Complete CV: JoseAntonioBowenCV2019

Music and Concert VIDEOS

Teaching Naked VIDEOS and TED talks (Beethoven & Teaching)

See MEDIA stories for José Bowen