Julie Husband

Dr. Julie Husband received her BA from Bucknell University, her MA from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo.  Dr. Husband joined the UNI faculty in 2000 where she has taught classes in American literature, short fiction, contemporary writers Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, as well as an assortment of liberal arts core courses.  She has contributed to interdisciplinary programs and events on campus, including the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Emily Dickinson Artsongs, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and the Walt Whitman celebration.

In collaboration with Dr. Jim O’Loughlin, Dr. Husband published Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 (Greenwood Press, 2004), an examination of many facets of life during this tumultuous period, incorporating first-hand accounts from steel workers, industrial tycoons, female mill workers, domestic advice columnists, educators, and more. Dr. Husband has published articles on Frederick Douglass (Proteus: A Journal of Ideas and Roots and Realities of Multiculturalism), 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). She has also published several book reviews and spoken at numerous conferences.

She is currently working on a second book, Incendiary Pictures: the American Antislavery Movement and Northern Conceptions of “Free Labor.”  This work of examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of “free labor” in pre-Civil War America.  Analyzing literature written by people immersed in antislavery discourse, the manuscript focuses on writers like Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, and E.D.E.N. Southworth who are abolitionists as well as writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and the women writing for the Lowell Offering. All of them are profoundly influenced by the “family politics” campaign of abolitionists, a campaign that repeatedly produced narratives and sketches of slave families separated in the marketplace, masters sexually exploiting slave women, and white fathers selling their mixed race children.  The manuscript demonstrates that the new, radical antislavery campaign was marked by two developments closely related to industrial capitalism:  the use of incendiary pictures denouncing the commodification of the family and, ironically, the use of the marketplace as a means for combating slavery and other forms of intimate oppression.

Dr. Husband and Dr. O’Loughlin are married and have three children, Nicholas, in fourth grade, Devin, in kindergarten, and Ian, into everything as he is two years old.

Contact Dr. Husband