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; his work has also appeared in American progressive magazine The Nation, The Boston Review, and The London Review of Books.^[3][5][7][8]

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

In 2016, Karp's first book, 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]

Originally from Rockville, Maryland and raised by a single mother, 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 identified as a "moderate Democrat", but became more interested in socialism and democratic socialism following the Great Recession in 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011.^[6]