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John Shelton Reed (born 1942) is a sociologist and essayist, author or editor of eighteen books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed regularly contributes articles to non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Oxford American. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement in 2000 as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. While at UNC he helped to found the Center for the Study of the American South and was a founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.

Reed was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2000, and elected chancellor of that organization beginning in 2009. He has lectured at over 300 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad and held visiting positions at over a dozen, including Fulbright lectureships in Israel and India, and the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. After his retirement from the University of North Carolina, he held visiting positions at a number of institutions; among other things, he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University and a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina Unorganized Militia, while teaching at The Citadel, in Charleston.

Reed has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, and (twice) a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of the South and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

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