Alan Karras

Karras, AlanAssociate Director, Senior Lecturer
Department(s): Interdisciplinary Social Science Programs
101 Stephens Hall
Phone: 510-643-3185
Email: karras@berkeley.edu

About

Alan Karras is Associate Director of, and Senior Lecturer in, ISSP. He received a BA/MA in History from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania. In his more than twenty-five years at Berkeley, he has taught courses on world history, classical political economy, Caribbean history, and the history of transnational crime. His research interests are in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and global interactions more broadly, especially as they relate to transnational transgressions like smuggling, fraud, and corruption. He is the author of “Smuggling: Corruption and Contraband in World History” (2010), “Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800” (1993), the coeditor, with John R. McNeill, of “Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888” (1992) and, with Laura Mitchell, “Encounters Old and New in World History” (2017). He served as one of the editors for Cambridge Dictionary of World History and was on the board of editors for Cambridge University Press’s multi-volume Cambridge World History. Since 2015, he has been the lead author for the AP Edition and the Lead Media Author for other editions of “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart,“ W.W. Norton’s Market leading world history textbook. A recipient of several teaching awards over the course of his career from Penn to Cal, he has also received the Distinguished Service Award in Berkeley’s Social Science Division of the College of Letters and Science.

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