About Karen L. Cox

Boundless South

Series Editors
Karen L. Cox, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Françoise Hamlin, Brown University


About Karen L. Cox

Photo by Cass Bradley

Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,  is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes of southern history and has written numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, (winner of the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History) which was reissued in 2019 with a new preface. She’s also the author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, and Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South

Karen writes op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post, and regularly gives media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe on the subject of southern history and culture, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She also appeared in Henry Louis Gates’ PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War. Her latest book is No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, published by Ferris and Ferris.

Karen is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and has lived in Mississippi and Kentucky.  She now makes her home in Charlotte, North Carolina.