Alden Young

Alden Young is an associate professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is a political and economic historian of Africa and the Middle East. His first book, Transforming Sudan discusses the role of the new science of economic development in the transition of Sudan from an imperial possession to a newly independent state.  Alden is currently at work on two new books. The first is tentatively entitled The Afrabians and it uses the writings of the Sudanese scholar Muhammad Abu al-Qasim Hajj Hamad to tell the story of the relationship between northeast Africa and the Arab Gulf states from the 1970s until the early 2000s. Alden is also writing a book on post-partition conflicts in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Sudan-South Sudan and Ethiopia-Eritrea) with the political scientist Michael Woldemariam. Alden recently completed a project on the perceptions and impacts of climate change in the countries that form the Red Sea Basin with Nathalie Puetz of NYU Abu Dhabi and Dheaya Alrousan of the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan. This collaboration with scholars in nine countries resulted in the creation of Red Sea Net, a digital resource. To learn more about the gestation of this project please read the following article in Items. 

Alden comes to Yale from UCLA where he was an associate professor of African American Studies at UCLA and a standing member of the faculty in the International Institute. Before that he taught for five years in the History Department at Drexel University. He has been a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published numerous academic journals and writes frequently in popular forums like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Noema Magazine.   

 

Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation (Cambridge 2018/2020)

 

“How Sudan’s Wars of Succession Shape the Current Conflict,” Report Foreign Policy Research Institute (July 3, 2024). 

 

With Keren Weitzberg, “Globalizing Racism and De-provincializing Muslim Africa,” Modern Intellectual History (2022) 19:3 pp: 912-933.

 

“The Intellectual Origins of Sudan’s ‘Decades of Solitude,’ 1989-2019,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics (2021) 2:1: pp: 196-226

 

With Michael Woldemariam, “After the Split: Partition, Successor States, and the Dynamics of War in the Horn of Africa,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2018) 41:5: pp: 684-720