Fowler, Josephine

Biography

Josephine Fowler was born on February 7, 1957 in San Francisco, California to parents Joseph William Fowler and Nevi Unti Isaura Fowler. With her two sisters, she spent her early years surrounded by an extended family of Italian American relatives on her mother's side and by New England and English Canadian grandparents on her father's side. At the age of five, her family left San Francisco and lived in many cities across North America, including Chicago, Detroit and New York, until settling in Toronto, Canada in 1967. There, Josephine attended the Toronto French School, becoming fluent in French, proficient in Russian, and earning the Governor General's Award.

After completing a Bachelor of Arts with honors in English and French from Oberlin College in 1979, Fowler went on to graduate with an MFA in writing from Columbia University in 1985. Her interest in the human experience led her to travel to Europe and Africa, including a trip to Senegal where she lived with the Bassari tribe to research child development. Fowler's writing was often focused on families and personal relationships and earned her residencies with the Ragdale Foundation in 1985 and the Yaddo artists' community in 1988. Fowler taught English as a second language to adult learners at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. During her five years as a teacher, she was readmitted to Columbia University, where she earned a Master of Science in Historical Preservation in 1993 with a focus on the influence of physical space on social and political interactions in the historical context.

In 1995, Fowler entered the University of Minnesota's American Studies Program, where she became increasingly focused on the Asian immigrant experience and on marginalized groups, particularly as this played out in labor organizing, social activism and communist movements in the United States and across the Pacific. Her own involvement in the lesbian and gay community led her to interview leftists and activists from the San Francisco Bay area, including her parents. She became the fiction editor for Evergreen Chronicles, a journal of gay and lesbian literature published in Minneapolis, from 1995-1999, as well as the coordinator of the University of Minnesota's Lesbian Area Research Program at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies from 1994-1995. In 1996, Fowler was diagnosed with breast cancer but continued her study at the University of Minnesota.

Fowler's research interests shifted from San Francisco Bay Area leftists to a comparative history of gay men and lesbians and Asian Americans in the Communist Party in the Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s. She later expanded her research in order to understand the early development of the Communist Party in the United States. Her interest in the history of Communism earned her a research fellowship in Moscow with the Center of the Study of Russia and the Soviet Union (part of Praxis International) in 1999. While living in Moscow for six months, Fowler was one of the first American scholars given permission to access the Communist International records at the Russian State Archives on Socio-Political History. Upon her return, Fowler created the first version of her dissertation in the form of a historical play entitled "La Famiglia: a domestic drama in three acts," but decided to write an entirely new dissertation.

In 2002, Fowler was an instructor at Metropolitan State University and the University of Minnesota, while continuing work on her dissertation. She presented a paper at the 2003 meeting of the American Historical Association entitled "To Speak 'on behalf of the Asiatic races and exploited workers': Identity Formation of Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Communists in the American Communist Movement, 1920-1933." After working as an instructor at the Center for Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in Spring 2003, Fowler defended her dissertation entitled "To be Red and 'Oriental': The Experiences of Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Communists in the American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933," was nominated for the University of Minnesota's "Best Dissertation Award" and received her doctorate in American Studies.

For the 2003-2004 academic year, Fowler worked as a Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, and published the fifth chapter of her dissertation in the Fall 2004 issue of International Labor and Working-Class History. In 2003, Fowler's breast cancer returned and she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work on turning her dissertation into a book. Fowler died at home on July 23, 2006, just weeks after completing the book for publication. The University of Minnesota American Studies Program established the Josie Fowler Peace and Justice Prize in her honor in 2007. Her book, entitled Japanese and Chinese Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933, was published by Rutgers University Press on July 15, 2007. An essay by Fowler entitled "Filling the rice bowls of China: staging humanitarian relief during the Sino-Japanese War" was published in a collection by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu entitled Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture in 2008.

From the guide to the Josephine Fowler papers, 1883-2005, (University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections.)