Alan Charles Kors (born July 18, 1943)[1] is an American historian who is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania,[2] where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Kors graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1964, and received a M.A.

He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002.

[3] Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey Silverglate and served from 2000 to 2006[citation needed] as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

He has occasionally written pieces for popular libertarian journals on political matters such as Reason.