Kevin Chang works on a variety of subjects: science and medicine in early modern Europe, the history of media and publication, comparative studies of the humanities (philology and linguistics in particular) and global history of higher education. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has since been working at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national academy. He co-edited World Philology (Harvard University Press, 2015) with Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman, Impagination: Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication (de Gruyter, 2021) with Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, and A Global History of Education: Disciplines, Institutions, and Nations, 1840-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Alan Rocke. He has finished a manuscript with the title The Dissertation: A Global History. This book examines the dissertation as a genre of academic writing and publication since its origin as the disputation in the earliest medieval universities, investigates its evolution in the early modern period, analyzes it formation in the early nineteenth century, and traces its globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also works on a manuscript entitled “From Writing to Spoken Languages: the Breakaway of Language Sciences from Philology, 1880-1960 (contracted with Princeton University Press). He has received the Fulbright Fellowship, the Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholarship, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Experienced Scholar Fellowship. He is a member of the International Commission for the History of Universities and served as the Ambassador Scientist for Germany’s Humboldt Foundation.
