Karen Cook Bell is Professor of History at Bowie State University.   She is the University System of Maryland Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor and Director of the Du Bois Center for the Study of the Black Experience at Bowie State University.  Her areas of specialization include slavery, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and publications. 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 and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2024);  co-editor of the Broadview edition of Twelve Years a Slave; and general editor of the “Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States.”  Dr. Cook Bell is also the editor of the Cambridge Studies on Black Women in US History book series.  Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of African American History and managing editor of the journal Freedom:  A Journal of Research in Africana Studies. She is an AAUW Alumnae.