Julie K. Brown is an Independent Scholar now living in Austin, Texas. She is originally from Rochester, New York where she received a M.A. in art history from the University of Rochester in 1966. After teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology and working on an innovative education project for the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, she moved to Queensland in Australia in 1969. Here she taught in the Department of Art History at the University of Queensland for several years and received a Ph.D. from the Department of History in 1985. She moved to San Antonio, Texas in 1985 where she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio before beginning her career as an Independent Scholar.

Over the years she has received several grants and fellowships including a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Rochester (1990), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1994-1995), and several grants from the Smithsonian Institution where she continues as a Research Associate at the National Museum of American History in the Division of Medicine and Science.

She was awarded a National Library of Medicine Publications Grant, National Institutes of Health (2005-2008) for her book Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876-1904, The MIT Press, 2009.