Karen L. Cox Named Distinguished Lecturer

Karen L. Cox, a professor of history at UNC Charlotte, has been named a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history.

The Distinguished Lectureship Program is a speakers’ bureau dedicated to American history and includes more than 400 participating historians who have made major contributions to the field. Cox is one of 45 speakers chosen to join the bureau for 2013-14.

Each lecturer agrees to present at least one lecture each year on behalf of the organization and to donate the lecture fee to the OAH to help fulfill its mission. Lecturers present in a wide array of academic and public settings, including undergraduate and graduate student conferences, seminars and events hosted by historical societies, museums, libraries, and humanities councils.

Cox teaches courses in American history with a focus on southern history and culture. She is the author of Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (2003,) which won the Southern Association for Women Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (2011.) She is the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (2012.)

Cox writes about representations of the region and its people in contemporary popular media in the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture. She has appeared on C-SPAN and Canadian Public Radio and has written op-eds for The New York Times. She has been interviewed frequently by national and local news media, and has appeared several times on Charlotte Talks, a popular radio talk show on local NPR station WFAE. She was the distinguished speaker in 2012 at the Levine Museum of the New South annual lecture, presented by the UNC Charlotte Center for the Study of the New South.

Lectures she will offer as part of the OAH Distinguished Lecturers Program are: Women and Confederate Memory, The South in American Popular Culture, The South in Reality Television, and Gone with the Wind in Popular Culture.

The OAH represents more than 7,800 historians working in the U.S. and abroad. Its members include college and university professors, pre-collegiate teachers, archivists, museum curators, public historians, students, and scholars who work in government and the private sector.

The organization’s mission is to promote excellence in the scholarship, teaching and presentation of American history, and to encourage wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history. It takes guidance from its principles of advancement of scholarship, historical advocacy and professional integrity.