Dr. Golden Owens, the newest faculty member in the Cinema & Media Studies department, joins Humanities Academic Services (HAS) for an interview about her experiences as an undergraduate and graduate student and her journey through higher education to becoming a professor.

Hear Dr. Owens share her experiences, including what inspired her to pursue a PhD and a career in academia. Listen to Dr. Owens’s interview with Humanities Academic Services.

Biography

Golden M. Owens explores and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States The project demonstrates this haunting through analyzing popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.

Dr. Owens' work appears in Sounding Out! and has been accepted by the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (via the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine), the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (f.k.a. the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University's Office of Fellowships, and Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.