[5] During her PhD she was a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley on an SSRC research fellowship.
[6][7] In 2004, she became the Seton-Watson Research Fellow in International Relations at Oriel College, Oxford and part of the Oxford-Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.
[8] In 2007, she moved to Queen Mary University of London as a senior lecturer in International Relations and taught there until 2011.
Owens published her first book, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt in 2007.
[12] She is a longtime co-editor of the textbook, The Globalization of World Politics: an Introduction to International Relations, published by Oxford, and currently in its seventh edition.