Madison U. Sowell was appointed provost and vice president of academic affairs at Tusculum University in June 2018.
Sowell earned a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from BYU (with Highest Honors from the Honors Program) and a master's degree and Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, where he won the Jacoby Prize for scholarship and his department's travel-study prize for outstanding teaching.
Sowell has written over 150 articles, book reviews, editorials, and essays primarily related to Dante and Italian literature.
His illustrated books Il Balletto Romantico: Tesori della Collezione Sowell (Palermo: L'Epos, 2007) and Icônes du ballet romantique: Marie Taglioni et sa famille (Rome: Gremese, 2016) were co-authored with his wife Debra H. Sowell, a dance historian and Southern Virginia University professor emerita of humanities.
His latest single-authored book, Disdéri's Dancers and Carte-de-Visite Ballet Photography in the French Second Empire (Benevento: Edizioni Kinetès, 2023), was formally presented at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome in December 2023.