Karen Cook Bell holds the Ph.D. in U.S. history with specialization in slavery and emancipation from Howard University; a Master of Arts (History) from Howard University; and a Bachelor of Arts (History) from Savannah State University. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Bowie State University and has also engaged in postdoctoral study at Johns Hopkins University. She has taught African American history, the African Diaspora, and U.S. history as Visiting Assistant Professor at Towson University; as a Lecturer at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland; at Howard University; and Savannah State University in Georgia. Her research encompasses the history of slavery and emancipation in the U.S. South. Her publications on slavery, emancipation, and the African Diaspora have appeared in the Georgia Historical Quarterly, the Journal of African American History, U.S.-West Africa: Interaction and Relations (University of Rochester Press, 2008), Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (Praeger: October 2012), Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (University of Georgia Press: 2012); and several historical encyclopedias. She has held research fellowships at the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America (Harvard University), the W.E.B. DuBois Institute Seminar on the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University); and served as an American Association of University Women (AAUW) American Dissertation Fellow. She is the recipient of the William Bacon Stevens Award from the Georgia Historical Society for "Best Graduate Article." She is currently serving on the American Historical Association's Committee on Minority Historians. As a former archivist of U.S. State Department Records and U.S. Information Agency Records at the National Archives and Records Administration, she has presented aspects of U.S. foreign relations with Africa during the early Cold War at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the British National Archives, Kew. She is currently working on a book monograph tentatively titled "Claiming Freedom for Themselves: Kinship, Land, and Race in Nineteenth Century Georgia."