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 and Native American Studies. His most popular classes include Indigenous Peoples and Globalization, Native Americans and the Founding Documents, 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, religious history, ethnomusicology, and ecomusicology. His research engages indigenous languages and Indigenous Knowledge systems, exploring the ways that social and economic changes are evident in the sound worlds and music of North American and Caribbean places. 

Dr. Owen is committed to collaborative research and community engagement. Along with teaching, his work at UGA covers a broad range of Native America's contemporary issues, including public outreach, and administration of the Institute. He works closely with UGA faculty and programs, to sustain a rich program of courses, guest speakers, Native-focused events, student trips to Native American sites and communities, and community engagement in Georgia and North Carolina. Dr. Owen regularly collaborates with LeAnne Howe, Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature, James F. Brooks, Carl & Sally Gable Distinguished Professor of History, and the Laboratory of Archaeology at UGA,. 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 Cherokee Valuations Mapping Project Native Ground). Dr Owen has worked closely Rebecca Nagle on her book The Fire We Carry, and the First America podcast, and Western Carolina University's Cherokee Studies and Cherokee Language programs. He guest lectures in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music Ethnomusicology program with Jean Kidula, Professor of Music, and Jared Holton, Assistant Professor of Music.  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 also teaches US History for Common Good Atlanta and is part of the Board of the Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden at UGA which includes native southeast plants.

Dr. Owen's current book project (forthcoming 2027) 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.  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, vocals, found objects and home-made instruments 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 to generate lush soundscapes that reflect distinctions of place and time. 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.