Matt Karp

Matthew Karp is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University since 2013 and was an Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor from 2016 to 2019.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Karp was also an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2012 and a Teaching Fellow at Rowan University from 2011 to 2012.[1] Karp is a contributing editor for American socialist magazine Jacobin and has contributed articles to American liberal magazine The Nation.[3][5]

At Princeton, Karp teaches courses on the politics of the American Civil War era, abolitionism and slavery, the United States in the nineteenth century, and the political conflicts of the nineteenth century.[2][4][6] Karp earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Amherst College in 2003 and earned a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011.[1][2]

In 2016, Karp's first book titled This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy was published by Harvard University Press and went on to win several awards.[1][2][4] The book examines how slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War.[2] Karp is currently writing a book titled The Radicalism of the Republican Party, which examines the emergence of anti-slavery politics in the United States and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s before the Civil War.[1][2][4]

Karp canvassed for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and for Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.[6] In the 1990s and 2000s, Karp was a self-identified "moderate Democrat", but became more interested in socialism and democratic socialism following the Great Recession in 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011.[6]