James A Owen

James Owen is Assistant Director, Academic Professional Associate, and Instructor in the Institute of Native American Studies. He is a historian and musician from the mountains of Western North Carolina. He has held fellowships and received funding from the Newberry Library, the American Musicological Society, the Moravian Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the UGA Graduate School. James teaches undergraduate & graduate courses in US History, Native American History, Religion in America, and Senior Thesis courses. as well as Native American Studies and Indian Policy courses. His most popular classes include Indigenous Peoples and Globalization, and NAGPRA & the US, which covers the history, cultural context, and implications of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act. He advises INAS certificate students and the Native American Student Association (NASA). Dr. Owen's interdisciplinary work bridges the fields of Native American Studies, Appalachian Studies, New World Religious History, and ethnomusicology. He also works on historical research in the emerging field of Ecomusicology, focusing on the sounds of North American and Caribbean places as Christianity and capitalist economies were introduced into Indigenous societies. This research explores the ways that social and economic changes are evident in the sound worlds and music of Indigenous places, engaging indigenous languages and Indigenous Knowledge systems. 

Dr. Owen is committed to collaborative research and community engagement. Along with teaching, his work at UGA covers a broad range of Native American history, contemporary issues, public outreach, and administration of the Institute. He works closely with INAS Director, LeAnne Howe, Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature, to sustain a rich program of courses, guest speakers, Native-focused events, and community engagement in Georgia and North Carolina. Dr. Owen collaborates with James F. Brooks, Carl & Sally Gable Distinguished Professor of History, on regional Native History projects, programming, and student trips to Cherokee Country in North Carolina. He has worked with Claudio Saunt, Richard B. Russell Professor of American History (Unworthy Republic, West of the Revolution, the Invasion of America interactive digital history map, and the forth-coming Cherokee Valuations Project interactive map), Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation advocate, journalist and author whose book, The Fire We Carry, for which Dr. Owen was a historical researcher, was released in September 2024), ethnomusicologist Jean Kidula, Professor of Music, the Laboratory of Archaeology at UGA, and Western Carolina University's Cherokee Studies and Cherokee Language programs. He is a board member of Georgia's Historic Piedmont Scenic Byways Corporation (HPSBC), a non-profit, which manages the Rock Hawk Effigy Mound site in Putnam Co, GA. James teaches US History for Common Good Atlanta and is also part of the management team for the Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden at UGA (which, in the 2024-25 academic year, will become the Garden of the Americas to include an expansion of native southeast plants).

Dr. Owen's current book project looks at indigenous and creole language translations of Christian hymns and biblical narratives from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. His work demonstrates that knowledge shared in multi-ethnic mission communities of the New World has played a central role in shaping evangelical Christianity. He is currently participating in a project on the history of the Asheville Community Resource Center, an activist collective of the early 2000s. Dr. Owen's publications include Community & Place, Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Globalization (textbook KendallHunt, 2020) and the book chapter, "Come Holy Spirit, Lord God: The Holy Ghost in the Cherokee Mountains" in Seeking Home: Marginalization and Representation in Appalachian Literature and Song (UT Press, 2017). 

James has been a working musician since the late 1980s. He plays drums, percussion, synthesizers, clarinet, and vocals with rock, free-improvisation, and experimental music groups and in solo performances. His experimental music employs loops, samples, field recordings, contact mics, triggers, and controlled feedback using traditional instruments, found objects, home-made string & percussion instruments, and voice. James premiered his original composition Gwal'ga'hi: An Aural Eco-History of Frog Place at the 2014 Ecomusicologies conference. His frequent collaborators include Don Howland, Shane Parish, Eric Hubner, Matt Gentling, Emmy Pierce, and regional performers and musicians in Athens and Asheville. He has released recordings on In the Red Records (LA, CA), Red Lounge Records (Karlsruhe, Germany), Hate Records (Rome, Italy), Family Night Records (Asheville, NC), Open Letter Records (Asheville, NC), and bandcamp.

Upcoming Activities for the 2024-2025 Academic year: 

October 5, 2pm Dr. Owen will be giving the keynote lecture, "John Comenius and Education at Harvard Indian School"  for the 167th Moravian Historical Society gathering in Nazareth Pennsylvania, discussing the seventeenth-century relationship between John Amos Comenius, last Bishop of the Bohemian Brethren, and John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians of Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

August - September NAGPRA info-sessions at UGA, check events calendar for listings, some sessions will be open to the public, others will be limited to UGA faculty and students.