Karen L. Cox 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 on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.
A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments and, most recently, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 14th, which will appear on Netflix December 4, 2026.
Cox is a 2026-2027 fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University where she is working on her latest book Confederate Nation, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2028. Confederate Nation examines the role the Lost Cause has played in American culture and politics since the end of the Civil War.
Dr. Cox is also a professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she taught from 2002-2024.
Read and subscribe to her Substack America and the Lost Cause.
