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 knows that staying immersed in the worlds that cultivated her growing interest in history is what keeps her grounded and committed to teaching community-based history. As a child, she remembers sitting on the front porch with her granddaddy in SC’s Low Country listening raptly while he regaled her with ghost stories about the enslaved in his Gullah tongue to listening to her working-class neighbors lovingly play the dozens with each other in her childhood hometown of Anacostia in SE Washington, DC. Dr. Cooper Owens learned early on that stories are what draw people into wanting to know more about the past.  

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 as a Big Ten Academic Leadership Fellow. 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.