Karen Cook-Bell

Department of History and Government

Karen Cook Bell is Professor of History at Bowie State University.  She is the University System of Maryland Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor. Her areas of specialization include slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; the Journal of Women’s History; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (2024); Women in Exile in Early Modern Europe and the Americas (2024); Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014); Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013); Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012); and U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008). She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land  in Nineteenth Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award; and Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, which is published with Cambridge University Press. Running From Bondage received the Best Book Award from the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society; the Letitia Woods Brown Honorable Mention Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; and was a finalist for the Pauli Murray Prize for Best Book in African American Intellectual History from the African American Intellectual History Society.  She is editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2024); and is co-editor of the Broadview edition of Twelve Years a Slave.  She is a AAUW Alumnae.