Joy Wang joined the Colorado College faculty in 2026. She is a political theorist and historian of political thought whose research investigates the political forms through which colonized peoples, especially in Africa and the Caribbean, have sought to develop and sustain the capacity for collective self-determination in the wake of colonial rule. 

Her current book project, Global Reconstruction, recovers a set of debates between postcolonial state-builders and social movements in the middle decades of the twentieth century about the conditions under which postcolonial developmental states could be constituted as democratic regimes. Reconstructing postcolonial societies without reproducing the dominations of colonial development, thinkers like C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney argued, could not be carried out through political institutions inherited from the colonial state, but required experimentation with new forms of postcolonial mass democracy.