Kevin Chang works on a variety of subjects: science and medicine in early modern Europe, book history, comparative studies of the humanities (philology, linguistics, and history 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. He co-edited World Philology (Harvard University Press, 2015) with Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman, and Impagination: Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication (de Gruyter, 2021) with Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most. Another edited volume, A Global History of Education: Institutions, Disciplines and Nations, 1840-1950 is forthcoming in the History of Universities series of Oxford University Press. He is finishing 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 (School of Historical Studies), the Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholarship, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Experienced Scholar Fellowship, and visited the Institute for Advanced Study, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. He is a member of the International Commission for the History of Universities and serves as the Ambassador Scientist for Germany’s Humboldt Foundation.
