Golden M. Owens is an Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at The University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Owens researches and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Invested in demonstrating how historical constructions of identity have influenced American media and technology, Owens’ work maps the invisible, hidden, and subliminal connections between contemporary U.S. media objects and historical articulations of race, gender, and labor.

Her current book project, Digital Maids in Domestic Spaces: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Assistants, and the Ghosts of Black Women’s Labor, examines how artificially intelligent virtual assistants such as the Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and ChatGPT evoke and are haunted by Black female houseworkers in the United States. Demonstrating how these women haunt these devices, the monograph provides a historical account of human and nonhuman labor-performing devices and critical analyses of domestic service and domestic servants portrayed in 20th and 21st century U.S. media. An interdisciplinary project that spans Film and Media studies, Black studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender and Sexuality studies, Sound/Voice studies, and Science and Technology Studies, Digital Maids asserts that we cannot truly understand or navigate contemporary digital technologies without recognizing and acknowledging the racialized and gendered labor histories that influence and are embedded within their programming.

Dr. Owens’ published work appears in Flow, The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, and Sounding Out. Her work has been funded by he Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University's Office of Fellowships, The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. 

Outside of academia, Owens is a 4th Dan Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do (Kukkiwon certified, World Taekwondo) and a certified scuba diver. She balances her research with her hobbies, which include singing, dancing, reading, paddle boarding, and watching reality television.

UW Faculty Page

Email me!

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in Screen Cultures, Northwestern University, 2023

M.A. in Screen Cultures, Northwestern University, 2018

B.A. in English Literature, Bowdoin College, 2015

RECENT GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS

  • Walter Chapin Simpson Center Grant: Research Cluster on Black Digital Studies in the Age of Technofascism, 2025-26

  • Simpson Center Grant: Faculty Writing Group: Book Projects Centering Transnational, Feminist, and Antiracist Approaches to Technology, Surveillance, and State Violence, 2025-26

  • Simpson Center Grant: Research Cluster on AI, Creativity, and the Humanities, 2024-25

  • Ford Dissertation Fellowship, 2022

  • MMUF Dissertation Grant, 2022

  • Graduate Assistantship with Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University, 2021-22

  • Graduate Assistantship with Northwestern University Office of Fellowships, 2020-21

  • Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (Awarded in 2013)