Ianna Owen

Ianna Hawkins Owen is an advanced assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies, within Social Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Owen earned a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley, where the dissertation informed the book project Ordinary Failures, examining limits of diaspora discourse amid misrecognition, betrayal, suicide, idleness, and asexuality. Prior to the doctorate, Owen received a Bachelor’s degree from the African, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies Department at Hunter College, City University of New York, through the Macaulay Honors College and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Following the Ph.D., Owen held the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of English at Berkeley for the 2016-2017 academic year, mentored by faculty member Nadia Ellis. This position supported postdoctoral research, professional development, and contributions to diversity and equal opportunity at UC.

Owen’s research specializations encompass African diaspora theory, Black literary and visual culture, asexuality—particularly Black asexuality and its racialization—queer care, critical eating studies, failure, queer and trans grief practices, and prison abolition. Key publications include “Still, Nothing: Notes on Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility” in Feminist Review (vol. 120, no. 1, 2018); “On the Racialization of Asexuality” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014); “‘Freedom Lovers’: Blackness, Asexuality, Abolition” in the revised and expanded edition of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2024); “More: Asexuality, Feedism, Cake” in Social Text (vol. 40, no. 2), which received an honorable mention for the Crompton-Noll Award for Best LGBTQ Studies Article; “It Me: Annotation and Restraint” in Post45 Contemporaries; and “Dead Tired” in Qui Parle (vol. 33, no. 1, 2024). Owen’s first monograph, Ordinary Failure: Diaspora’s Limits and Longings, is under contract with Duke University Press. Additional honors include the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award supporting a second manuscript. Owen serves on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture and teaches courses such as the Gender and Women's Studies Senior Seminar on race, gender, and sexuality in indie publications.Professional Email: io@berkeley.edu