Marjoleine Kars

Marjoleine Kars is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A native of the Netherlands, Dr. Kars received her BA and PhD from Duke University in Durham, NC. Her new book about a large, little known and remarkably successful slave rebellion in a Dutch colony (now the Republic of Guyana) on the Caribbean coast of South America, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast was published by The New Press in August. It will come out in a Dutch translation by Atlas Contact in January 2021. An article about this work, “Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763,” was published in the American Historical Review in Feb. 2016 and won four prizes from historical societies focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, women, and early modern world history.

With Michael McDonnell and Andrew Schocket, Dr. Kars is editing a three-volume The Cambridge History of the American Revolution. Previously, she published Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Her work has been supported by fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the European University Institute, the Huntington Library, and UMBC.

After six years as chair of UMBC’s History Department, Dr. Kars is a senior editor of International Labor and Working Class History. She has served as a board member and Vice-President of FEEGI (Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions) and she has chaired prize committees for FEEGI, the AHA and the SHA. She regularly reviews for the Washington Post. Her website may be found at https://history.umbc.edu/facultystaff/full-time/marjoleine-kars/