Tommy Song

Tommy Song is a Ph.D candidate studying the global history of Indigenous and anti-colonial intellectuals in the making of American social sciences. 

 

Tentatively titled “Empire of Assistants: Global Origins of American Social Sciences,” his dissertation illuminates the centrality of assistants in the production of anthropology and sociology across and beyond the U.S. empire. Offering an anti-canon to the established narratives of disciplinary “fathers,” his project examines the “dead labor” of Indigenous and anti-colonial intellectuals from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania as central to the rise of social scientists like Lewis Henry Morgan, Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Robert E. Park. His research has been supported by Yale University’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Sarah Parker Remond Centre at University College London, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and more. 

 

At Yale, he has co-organized several conferences, most notably the Global History of Indigenous Thought conference in 2024. From 2023-2024, he was a co-president of the Andrews Society, the graduate student society of the history department. Before Yale, he was a Stabile Fellow in investigative journalism at Columbia Journalism School and a recording artist part of a now defunct indie label in Seoul. His writings have appeared in TIME magazine, The Nation, HIVat40 Project, and elsewhere.  

 

He is currently organizing digital walking tours on the Indigenous history of Connecticut and the critical history of universities. He welcomes queries for collaboration in academic/public history, legal advocacy, journalism, and music.