Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She received the Ph.D. in history from Howard University. 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 under contract with Cambridge University Press.