The UCLA scholar will work in the institute's Globalization and Geopolitics Program and continue his research on a new concept of the Red Sea as a coherent world region.

UCLA International Institute, May 25, 2021 — Alden Young, a UCLA historian with a joint faculty appointment in the International Institute and the African American studies department, has been awarded a Berggruen Institute fellowship for 2021–22 academic year.

Founded in 2010, the Los Angeles–based institute seeks to develop foundational ideas and shape political, economic and social institutions for the 21st century — both for the world and for California.

“These days many of the challenges that the world faces cannot be solved at the national level, they are both hyper-local and planetary in scope. For instance, climate justice in Sudan requires cooperation among all of the countries of the Red Sea littoral, one of the most unequal regions in the world in terms of per capita income and carbon emissions,” said Young.

“At the Beggruen, I hope to work with scholars across the Red Sea region and throughout the planet to try and think through some of these imbalances.”

Young is a political and economic historian of Africa. The author of "Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation" (Cambridge, 2017), his research focus spans African economic development, Sudan and the Red Sea region.

He is one of 16 scholars, activists and intellectuals leaders awarded Berggruen Fellowships for the coming year. The group is the seventh cohort of fellows named by the institute and will “re-imagine new possibilities for the post-Covid world.”

The UCLA scholar will be part of the Berggruen Institute’s Globalization and Geopolitics Program, where he will participate in a working group that will explore how the concept of the “planetary” should shape current systems of governance.

Young joined the UCLA faculty in 2019, but spent the 2019–20 academic year as a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He taught his first course for the International Development Studies Program of the International Institute, “Colonialism and Development,” in the spring 2021 quarter.

See profile of Professor Young (October 2020).

Published: Tuesday, May 25, 2021