Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Specifically, his current research project is situated between intellectual history and labor history, with a focus on forms of unfree labor migration—including slavery, indenture, prison labor, and debt bondage—that emerged to be generative of new spaces, novel forms of thought, and radical political claims around race, caste, nationality, and sovereignty.

Ultimately, he is interested in further studying the imbrications and intersections between anti-colonial intellectual, artistic, and political projects emerging from such cosmopolitan port cities as Bombay, Singapore, Durban, Hong Kong, Aden, and Zanzibar, among others. More broadly, he has a strong interest in Marxism and its global itineraries, histories of the Left, capitalism and political economy, modern political thought, postcolonial theory, and continental philosophy.   

Kelvin joined the Yale History Department in 2019. Prior to coming to Yale, he obtained his BA and MA degrees at Columbia University. He was born in Penang (Malaysia) and raised in Singapore, and he is proficient in Chinese, Malay, French, and Arabic.