Alexander Baert Young is a Ph.D. Candidate working in French history, African history, and book history. He is researching and writing a history of African books in French in the era of cultural decolonization and at the height of the twentieth-century book revolution (late 1950s through late 1980s). This project draws on published paperback books, literary magazines, bibliographies, book fair catalogues, media studies and library science scholarship, and other ‘books about books’ as well as archives of nation-states, international organizations, publishing companies, libraries, and writers in Cameroon, Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, and France. His research has received support from the Millstone Research Fellowship of the Western Society for French History, an American Institute for Maghrib Studies grant, and the Bourse Jeanne Marandon of the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique. During 2021-2022, he was a visiting doctoral student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm). He holds an M.A. in Social Sciences (Concentration: History) from the University of Chicago and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College.