Joy Wang joined the ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø faculty in 2026. She is a political theorist and historian of political thought whose research investigates the political forms through which colonized peoples, especially in Africa and the Caribbean, have sought to develop and sustain the capacity for collective self-determination in the wake of colonial rule.
Her current book project,Global Reconstruction, recovers a set of debates between postcolonial state-builders and social movements in the middle decades of the twentieth century about the conditions under which postcolonial developmental states could be constituted as democratic regimes. Reconstructing postcolonial societies without reproducing the dominations of colonial development, thinkers like C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney argued, could not be carried out through political institutions inherited from the colonial state, but required experimentation with new forms of postcolonial mass democracy.
At ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø, Joy teaches courses on the political theory of empire and decolonization, the theory and praxis of social movements, and the dilemmas of emancipatory social transformation. Before coming to ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø, Joy was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and earned her Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. Her work has been published in theAmerican Political Science Review,Theory & Event, andAfrica is a Country.
