Hi! I am a historian of political thought and intellectual historian. I study twentieth-century political thought; anticolonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics; and Southeast Asia.

My dissertation traces the intellectual origins of the postcolonial state in Southeast Asia. It reconstructs ideas about the state and democracy in Indonesia, Malaya, and Singapore between 1945 and circa 1965. It examines how these ideas developed in response to the practical contingencies of decolonization and the Cold War, and how they shaped democratic theory in the second half of the twentieth century.

At Harvard University, I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Government. I am also a graduate affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for History and Economics. I am currently a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Fellow. In 2024– 25, I held the Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellowship in Ethics at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. 

I organize the Association for Global Political Thought, an organization working out of Harvard University and the American University in DC, with more than 100 research affiliates across the world. 

You can learn more about my research and teaching, and find my CV and contact information, in the other sections of this site.

You can call me by my two-word first name, YI NING. The family name is CHANG.