Research Expertise and Interest

African American studies, African diaspora, queer studies

Research Description

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Asexuality
• Black literary and visual culture
• Black diaspora theory
• Queer care
• Critical eating studies
• Failure
• Queer and trans grief practices
• Prison abolition

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• “Dead Tired,” Qui Parle (issue theme: Ordinariness), vol. 33, no. 1. URL: https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-11125495
• “‘Freedom Lovers’: Blackness, Asexuality, Abolition,” Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Revised & Expanded Edition), eds. KJ Cerankowski & Megan Milks. Routledge, 2024. URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003178798-32/freedom-lovers-ianna-hawkins-owen
• “More: Asexuality, Feedism, Cake,” Social Text, vol. 40, no. 2. (Crompton-Noll Award for Best LGBTQ Studies Article: Honorable Mention) 
  URL: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/40/2%20(151)/93/313289/MoreCake-Feedism-and-Asexuality
• “It Me: Annotation and Restraint,” Post45: Contemporaries Series (series theme: Other People’s Objects). URL: https://post45.org/2019/12/it-me-annotation-and-restraint/
• “Still, Nothing: Notes on Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility,” Feminist Review, vol. 120, no. 1.  
  URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1057/s41305-018-0140-9