Professor Kars teaches courses in early American history and Atlantic history. She is the author of Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2002). Dr. Kars is currently at work on a book about a massive slave rebellion in the 1760s in the Dutch colony of Berbice (now part of the Republic of Guyana). She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Historical Association, as well as from UMBC.