Clifton Crais is Professor of History at Emory University. Author of multiple award-winning books, his work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the Stanford Humanities Center. His new book, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World, explores how financial innovations combined with new and more destructive weapons created a military and commercial revolution that unleashed the worst global destruction since humans colonized the planet more than 10,000 years before the present and second only to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. The Killing Age will be released in the USA in October by the University of Chicago Press and in the Spring, 2026, by Picador (UK), followed by a Chinese translation.