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O’Neill GTA Award for Excellence in Teaching

HSS Summer Research Grant

HSS Innovative Pedagogy Award

Thunderbird Awards. Southern Utah University, 2023

Distinguished Faculty for Diversity and Inclusion

HSS Outstanding Scholarship Award

O’Neill GTA Award for Academic Excellence

Grace A. Tanner Distinguished Faculty Honor Lecture

Modern Language Association

Charles Brockden Brown Society

Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts

Society for Early Americanists

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Popular Culture & American Culture Association

Celebrating and Singing, Bleeding and Pining: Embodiment and Emotion in Walt Whitman and Adah Isaacs Menken

"An Essay on Slavery": An Unpublished Poem by Jupiter Hammon

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

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

On the Plains, and Among the Peaks: or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection: by Mary Dartt (Timberline Books)

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

Exploring Animal Encounters: Philosophical, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

ENGL 1010 Intro to Academic Writing

ENGL 2010 Writing about Animals

ENGL 2010 Writing About Disney

ENGL 2130 Imaginative Literature: Aliens & First Contact

ENGL 2600 Intro to Critical Theory

ENGL 3210 American Literature I

ENGL 4110 Early American Novels

ENGL 4210 Literary History: American Renaissance

ENGL 4510 Early American Experiments

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.

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

Personal Website

Dr. McCown

Academia

Bodily Eyes: Vision and Perception in the Works of Jupiter Hammon

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

Should we be afraid of chatbots?

Books Written or Edited by SUU Faculty in 2022

Professor of English

Julie McCown

Associate Professor of English

The Rocky Mountain Huntress: Recovering the Story of Martha Maxwell’s Frontier Taxidermy

American naturalist and taxidermist Martha Maxwell became famous in the 1870s for her skill and expertise in collecting and preserving specimens of Colorado’s wildlife. While not the first American woman naturalist, Maxwell is the earliest extant example of one acquiring and preparing animal specimens, engaging in the messy, dangerous, and bloody work previously left to her male counterparts. Despite Maxwell’s skill and fame as a taxidermist in the nineteenth century she is virtually unknown today. 

In this lecture, I will re-introduce On the Plains, and Among the Peaks; or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection (1879), written by Maxwell’s half-sister Mary Dartt. Dartt’s book tells the story of a woman whose lifelong passion and dedication to work and education made her a pioneer in more ways than one; it catalogs Maxwell’s important scientific contributions and development of museum habitat groupings and lifelike taxidermy mounts, showcases engaging accounts of wilderness excursions on the frontier of the Western U.S. in the 1860s and 1870s, and testifies to a woman’s resolve to show through her work that women were capable of succeeding in a traditionally male-dominated field. 

Julie McCown is an assistant professor of English at Southern Utah University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2016. She specializes in early American literature, animal studies, women writers, and digital humanities. Her recent publications have focused on early African American literature, nineteenth-century American poetry, and nineteenth-century women’s periodicals. Her critical edition of Mary Dartt’s On the Plains, and Among the Peaks; or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection is set to be published in Fall 2021 by the University Press of Colorado.

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https://www.suu.edu

A.P.E.X. Lecture Series
https://www.suu.edu/apex/

Julie McCown "The Rocky Mountain Huntress"- A.P.E.X. Speaker on 01/13/2022

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