Dr. Vivien Chang

Vivien Chang is a historian of development, decolonization, postcolonial Africa, and international political economy. She is completing her first book titled Creating the Third World: Postcolonial Development and the Search for a New International Economic Order (under contract with Yale University Press), which examines how African intellectuals and statesmen pursued economic sovereignty at the height of decolonization and the Cold War. She is also co-editing a volume on Africa-China relations in the 20th century. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, and multiple edited volumes. Vivien has previously held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School, Yale University, and Dartmouth College. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2022. At Harvard, she will be working on a new digital humanities project mapping the migration routes of African intellectuals.