Vincent Leung received his doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011. He also holds an A.M. in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University (2002) and a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2000). Since 2011, he has been an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Leung is broadly interested in the political and intellectual history of early China in the long first-millennium BCE. He is currently finishing a manuscript, based on his dissertation The Politics of the Past in Early China, that studies the different ways in which history became a contentious language for political debates under the rise of empires in early China. At ISAW, he will begin a new research project, entitled “Empire and Things: On the Genealogy of Commodities in Early China,” on the history of economic thought in early China. It will be a study of the many anxious and contentious intellectual responses to the radical transformation of the world of things under the rise of empires in early China in the late first-millennium BCE.