Bio

Deirdre Cooper Owens, an award-winning historian and popular public speaker, is a professor of history in New England.

As a teacher and public speaker, Cooper Owens credits where she was raised as key factors in her love for weaving together history and storytelling. She remembers vividly sitting on the front porch with her granddaddy in SC’s Low Country listening raptly to the ghost stories he told about the enslaved in his Gullah tongue. She was influenced by these experiences and similar ones that centered oral history. It is what ultimately led her to devote her life to become a professional historian.  

Cooper Owens is a proud graduate of two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the all-women's Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her Ph.D. in history at UCLA and has had a number of prestigious fellowships at the University of Virginia, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. As one of the country's most "acclaimed experts in U.S. history," according to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all.

Politically, she proudly works to advance reproductive justice.