Alden Young is an associate professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is a political and economic historian of Africa and the Middle East. He has written extensively about Sudan, and he is currently working on a number of research projects that examine the impact of the Arab Gulf States in the 1970s on the Greater Red Sea region. Alden is also writing a book on post-partition conflicts in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Sudan-South Sudan and Ethiopia-Eritrea) with political scientist Michael Woldemariam.

Alden comes to Yale from UCLA where he was an associate professor of African American Studies at UCLA and a standing member of the faculty in the International Institute. Before that he taught for five years in the History Department at Drexel University. He has been a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation (Cambridge University Press 2017), paperback release 2020. He has published numerous academic journals and writes frequently in popular forums like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Noema Magazine.