Julie McCown

Associate Professor of English Southern Utah University

  • Cedar City UT

Specializing in early American natural history, post-humanism, and digital humanities theory

Contact

Southern Utah University

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Biography

Dr. Julie McCown is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Utah University. She received her Ph.D. in English from University of Texas at Arlington in 2016 and her M.A in English from University of Texas of the Permian Basin in 2011. Her teaching and research interests are wide-ranging and include early American literature, women writers, queer literatures, and digital humanities/media theory. She also discovered a previously unknown poem by the 18th-century African American poet Jupiter Hammon, which introduced her to the wonders of archival research. Her recent publications have been about early African American literature, nineteenth-century American poetry, and nineteenth-century women’s periodicals. Her current research focuses generative artificial intelligence (AI) and how to critically and ethically incorporate AI into First-Year Composition.

Industry Expertise

Music
Writing and Editing
Media - Online
Education/Learning
Print Media
Publishing

Areas of Expertise

Artifical Intelligence
Ecocriticism
Race and Nature in Early American Literature
Early American Novels
Composition
Early American Natural History
Posthumanism
English
Literature and Environment
Animal studies
Digital Humanities
Critical Theory
Early American Literature
Identities and Voices in American Literature
Methods of Teaching Literature in Higher Education
Media Theory
Theory in Literature

Education

University of Texas at Dallas

B.A.

Literary Studies

University of Texas of the Permian Basin

M.A.

English

University of Texas at Arlington

Ph.D.

English

Accomplishments

O’Neill GTA Award for Excellence in Teaching

University of Texas at Arlington, 2015

HSS Summer Research Grant

Southern Utah University, 2023

HSS Innovative Pedagogy Award

Southern Utah University, 2023

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Affiliations

  • Modern Language Association
  • Charles Brockden Brown Society
  • Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
  • Society for Early Americanists
  • American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
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Media Appearances

Books Written or Edited by SUU Faculty in 2022

T-Bird Nation  online

2022-11-18

Go back in time to the 1870s and experience the life of one of the West’s forgotten female figures. The story of Martha Maxwell and her life as a natural historian and taxidermist is one that no one really knows about. Written by her half-sister, Mary Darrtt, in 1879 and edited by SUU’s own Julie McCown, this book gives a unique perspective on women’s role in the old West in a never-before-seen light.

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Should we be afraid of chatbots?

Deseret News  online

2023-03-01

It doesn’t help that AI detection software is not fully reliable. Southern Utah University assistant English professor Julie McCown attested to the faultiness of GPTZero, a program meant to determine whether content was written by a human or AI. “I ran my AI essay that I spent five minutes on, ran it through GPTZero, and it said, ‘Oh, it was written by a human,’” McCown said, per SUU News.

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To Transcribe Them in a Fair and Legible Hand”: Hartford Female Seminary's Handwritten Newspapers

Scholarly Publishing Collective  online

2018-01-01

The School Gazette (1824–26) and The Levee Gazette (1828), handwritten newspapers produced by students at Hartford Female Seminary, comprise a previously overlooked archive of texts worthy of serious scholarly consideration. The wide-ranging content of the gazettes, coupled with their insights into nineteenth-century women's education and early American periodical culture, suggests their broad appeal to scholars in multiple literary and historical fields. The gazettes, this article argues, represent a distinctive form of early nineteenth-century American authorship and literary production through their mixture of personal, academic, and public literacies. This article also highlights the potential value of the digital humanities, both as a tool for conducting research on the gazettes and as a way to make them accessible to a wider range of scholars, educators, and students by creating digital editions of all eighteen issues of The School Gazette and The Levee Gazette.

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Articles

Dissolving into Visibility: Early American Natural History and the Corporeality of Interspecies Encounters

Palsgrave Macmillan

Julie McCown

Published in "Encountering Animal Bodies"

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Crocodilian Transmission: Correspondence Networks in William Bartram and Thomas De Quincey

Configurations

Julie McCown

This essay brings William Bartram’s 1791 Travels and Thomas De Quincey’s 1849 “The English Mail-Coach” into productive conversation with each other, focusing on crocodilians as a central point of connection. As both physical and semiotic specimens in correspondence networks, crocodilians become a medium of exchange through which Bartram and De Quincey confront the limits of personal identity and imperial expansion. By bringing together these two writers, the essay shows how crocodilians, as a medium of exchange, shift from physical, material specimens to abstract, imaginary symbols, and how natural history’s correspondence networks facilitate an abstraction and effacement of animals.

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"An Essay on Slavery": An Unpublished Poem by Jupiter Hammon

Muse

Julie McCown, Cedrick May

A previously unknown poem written by Jupiter Hammon of Long Island is one of the most important discoveries related to this eighteenth-century poet and slave in nearly a century.1 The poem, entitled “An Essay on Slavery, with Submission to Divine Providence, Knowing That God Rules over All Things,” directly addresses questions concerning slavery and is by far the most outspoken antislavery statement by this often-neglected eighteenth-century writer.

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Courses

ENGL 1010 Intro to Academic Writing

The first of the required GE writing courses introduces students to academic composition. Students will engage in writing as a process, pre-drafting strategies, multiple drafts, peer review, and large and small-scale revisions.

ENGL 2010 Writing about Animals

This course builds upon the skills learned in English 1010, reinforcing strategies that foster careful reasoning, argumentation, and rhetorical awareness of purpose, audience, and genre. The course emphasizes critically evaluating, effectively integrating, and properly documenting sources. The course involves several connected writing assignments that culminate in a major research project.

ENGL 2010 Writing About Disney

This course builds upon the skills learned in English 1010, reinforcing strategies that foster careful reasoning, argumentation, and rhetorical awareness of purpose, audience, and genre. The course emphasizes critically evaluating, effectively integrating, and properly documenting sources. The particular section examines and discusses all things Disney including films, parks, merchandise and fan culture.

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