Klemens Kaps studied history, philosophy and political science at the University of Vienna and the Universitat de Barcelona in 2002/2003 with an ERASMUS scholarship. During his studies and after graduating with distinction (2006), he worked as a journalist before starting work on his dissertation in 2007 as a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the PhD programme "Austrian Galicia and its Multicultural Heritage", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and conducted at the Institutes of Eastern European History as well as of Economic and Social History. He completed his PhD with distinction in 2011.

After working as post-doc resarcher at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville (2011-2015) and the University of Vienna (2016-2018), funded among others by an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship from the FWF and a Marie Curie Actions grant from the European Research Council (ERC), he started to work as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at Johannes Kepler University in 2018. Since October 2020, he has been Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social and Economic History at Johannes Kepler University.

Since 2020 he has been a member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte as well as member of the Advisory Board of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (ÖZG).

Klemens Kaps is a member of the Österreichische Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts, the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH), Verband der HistorikerInnen Deutschlands (VHD), the Sociétè Internationale des Historiens de la Méditerranée (SIHMED), Verein zur Förderung von Studien zur Interkulturellen Geschichte (VSIG) and Verein für die Geschichte des Weltsystems (VGWS),

His research focuses on the economic, social and intellectual history of the Habsburg Monarchy and Spain as well as global history between the 17th and 19th centuries.