Imani D. Owens

Imani D. Owens is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she has been teaching since 2019. Her academic work focuses on African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is currently a faculty fellow at both the Rutgers Institute for Global Racial Justice and the Center for Cultural Analysis.

Professor Owens specializes in twentieth and twenty-first-century African American and Caribbean fiction and poetics, with particular expertise in the Harlem Renaissance, translation studies, drama and performance studies, and sound studies. Her research examines how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the 'unruly'—that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed.

Her acclaimed book Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how Black creators across the hemisphere depicted folk culture—and Blackness itself—as sites of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. This work earned her an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association and was shortlisted for the 2024 MSA Prize for a First Book.

• Faculty Fellow, Institute for Global Racial Justice, 2021-2022
• Faculty Fellow, Center for Cultural Analysis, 2021-2022
• Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2018
• Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow, 2017
• Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Literature, 2013-2014

Her scholarly work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. Professor Owens holds a PhD from Columbia University and a BA from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, establishing a deep connection with her current institution.