Matt Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its connections with the broader nineteenth-century world. He teaches at Princeton University.

Matt is author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, published by Harvard University Press. The book explores the relationship between American slavery and American power in the decades before the Civil War.

Matt holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania (2011). His dissertation is the basis of his book and was the winner in 2012 of the C. Vann Woodward Prize awarded by the Southern Historical Association to the year’s best dissertation in southern history. Matt is a graduate of Amherst College (2003), where he majored in History, graduating Magna cum laude / Phi Beta Kappa. ^[3]