Julie Husband

Dr. Julie Husband joined the UNI faculty in 2000 where she has taught classes in American literature, short fiction, contemporary writers Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, and a wide variety of liberal arts core courses.  She has contributed to interdisciplinary programs and events on campus, including Study Abroad (summer course in Ireland), the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Emily Dickinson Artsongs, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, the Walt Whitman celebration, and the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Festival.

Dr. Husband’s research interests center on nineteenth-century literature, rhetoric, and history, especially texts dovetailing with reform movements.  In collaboration with Dr. Jim O’Loughlin, she wrote Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 (Greenwood Press, 2004; Second edition, ABC-CLIO, 2019), a social history of the industrial era, incorporating first-hand accounts from steel workers, industrial tycoons, domestic advice columnists, educators, and more.  Her second book, Antislavery Discourse in American Literature: Incendiary Pictures (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of “free labor” in mid-nineteenth century America.  Individual chapters focus on Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York, Frederick Douglass’s post-Civil War writing, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, The Lowell Offering, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  Most recently, she collaborated with scholars Jack McKivigan and Heather Kaufman on The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition (Yale UP, 2018).  The collection includes twenty of Douglass’s most important speeches with contextualizing headnotes, contemporaneous materials, and critical essays.  In addition, Dr. Husband has published articles and book chapters on Frederick Douglass (Proteus, Roots and Realities of Multiculturalism, Rhetoric Review, and Howard Journal of Communication), The Lowell Offering (Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers), Lydia Maria Child (ESQ), Philip Roth (Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author) and W.E.B. DuBois (The Afterlife of John Brown).