Mary Wearn began her career working with technology.  After earning a degree in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University, she worked first in medical research at the McGuire VA Medical Center and then as an electrical engineer for Naval Sea System Command.

In 2003, Dr. Wearn received a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Georgia and began a new phase of her life.  After graduation, she served as a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech, where she completed a post-graduate seminar in electronic pedagogy. In 2004, she began teaching in the former Humanities Division of Macon State College, where she served in the English,  New Media and Communications (formerly CIT), and Interdisciplinary Studies programs.   In 2010, the Department of Media, Culture, & the Arts was created at Macon State, and Wearn was named Chair.

Dr. Wearn’s research interests include gender studies, abolitionist writing and slave narratives, maternal theory, and electronic pedagogy.  She published  Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge) in 2008, and more recently contributed a chapter to the international essay collection  From the Personal to the Political: Towards a New Theory of Maternal Narrative (Susquehanna UP). Wearn’s newest project is a edited collection tentatively entitled Lived Theologies and Literature:  Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion.  In 2011, she was presented Macon State College's Outstanding Scholarship Award.