Golden M. Owens (she/her)

Assistant Professor
Photograph of Professor Golden M. Owens. She is a Black woman with long natural hair. She is looking at the camera and smiling. She is wearing a green top and blue pants. Her arms are folded, and there is a gold watch on her left wrist.

Contact Information

PDL B522

Biography

Ph.D, Screen Cultures, Northwestern University, 2023
M.A., ScreenCultures, Northwestern University, 2018
B.A., English Literature, Bowdoin College, 2015

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. 

 

Share