Alan Charles Kors is an intellectual historian, specializing in French intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair in History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kors has also been active in the defense of academic freedom since his arrival at Penn. In the widely covered 1993 "water buffalo incident," he defended Eden Jacobowitz against charges that he racially harassed a group of black sorority sisters. In the very early morning hours, the sorority was celebrating loudly just outside the dorms. Multiple students had yelled from their windows, in various ways, for the sorority to cease. When the police later came to question students, Jacobowitz volunteered that he yelled, "Shut up, you water buffalo." The sorority members eventually dropped the charges.

Kors co-founded with civil libertarian Harvey A. Silverglate and served from 2000-2006 as the chairman of the board of directors Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is an occasional contributor to Reason magazine.

In 1992 President Bush named him to Council of the National Endowment of the Humanities. He was confirmed by the United States Senate and served on the committee for six years.

In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Kors the prestigious National Humanities Medal for his "scholarship, devotion to the Humanities, and...defense of academic freedom." In 2006, he was the T.B. Davie Memorial Lecturer on academic freedom at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Kors has written on the emergence and flourishing of heterodox thought in eighteenth-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom.

He has served on the boards of several scholarly organizations, including The Historical Society and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.