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 and book project 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 1926 and 1960. I'm concerned with understanding how postcolonial states came to take on such (to use a simplistic gloss) undemocratic characters. 

Starting Fall 2026, I will be an Early-Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. I am currently completing my PhD at Harvard's Department of Government. 

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.