Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University and Chairperson of the Department of History and Government.    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; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008); Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012); Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013); and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014).  She has published 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.  Her current book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, is published with Cambridge University Press. She is editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstructionwhich is under contract with Cambridge University Press and is co-editor of the Broadview edition of Twelve Years a Slave.  She is a contributor for Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.  She is a former AAUW Dissertation Fellow.