Dr. Carolyn Ownbey (she/her) is a scholar of anticoloniality, citizenship, and human rights in literature and other media since the mid-20th century. She is presently Assistant Professor at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, where she previously served as Chair of English, Communications, and Literature and Faculty Director of the Degrees+ Programs. Her scholarship and teaching focus on anticolonial literature and other media; law, human rights and narrative; and theories of democracy and citizenship. Her current book in progress is an interdisciplinary project focused on questions of law, human and civil rights, nation, and state in several modes of political resistance writing since 1945.

She has essays published in Law & Literature, Textual Practice, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, among others, as well as in a number of edited volumes, including In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South (2022, Rutgers UP). She recently co-edited Global South Studies‘ inaugural Book Forum with Dr. Kerry Bystrom (Bard College Berlin) on the subject of Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War (Duke UP, 2020). She is co-editor of the 2024 collection Pandemic Play: Community in Performance, Gaming, and the Arts (Palgrave) with Dr. Catherine Quirk (Edge Hill University).