On Jan. 4, Bowe began his journey to Jordan where he is teaching mass communication theory for five months.

The exchange is facilitated by the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program and Bowe is one of 800 awarded this opportunity. For those that know Bowe, the exchange falls perfectly in line with the professor’s interests. He’s authored many peer-reviewed journal articles about Islamic media relations and started learning Arabic about ten years ago.

“I did two full years, but like a lot of languages, when you learn them and you don’t use them, you forget them,” he said. When he knew he was going to apply for this Fulbright, he enrolled in Arabic classes again, this time here at Western.

The course he’ll be teaching is under the University of Jordan’s American Studies program in Amman and, although he will certainly be improving his Arabic, will be taught in English.

At Western Bowe often teaches senior seminar for students in their final quarters of university. The class is centered around theories of mass communication, much of which Bowe will be using and exploring even more in-depth with his students in Jordan.

“That kind of approach gives them tools that they can then use to analyze media, or to think about media, in Jordan, in that region, internationally,” Bowe said. ”It gives you a lot of tools that you can use that are kind of portable, but also it helps us organize the endeavor of thinking about U.S. media in particular. It will definitely be that ‘greatest hits of mass comm theory’ I like to teach so much.”

The program will have him conducting research in addition to teaching. Bowe said he will be talking to other scholars on the program about their ideas and letting the location influence what he chooses to research.

“I’m going into this very open minded,” he said. “I’m going to let the experience kind of dictate what I take from it in a research perspective.”

Bowe is no stranger to research, he’s authored over 20 peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

“I love doing research. I think it’s very fun,” he said. “I find this work very rewarding.”

When he started his doctoral program, his professor Geri Alumit Zeldes taught a graduate class called Reporting on Islam. He was interested in the topic and ended up working closely with Zeldes on research projects and a short documentary.

“It was really that experience of really understanding there was a problem in the way we have these conversations in the media space and realizing that nobody else was going to do this work to help fix it.”