Selda Altan is Associate Professor of History at Randolph College, Virginia. During the 2025–26 academic year, she is a Visiting Scholar at NYU Shanghai’s Center for Global Asia.

A historian of modern China, Altan specializes in labor history, colonialism, and Global Asia. Her first book, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway (Stanford University Press, 2024), examines labor conflicts during the construction of the Yunnan railway (1898–1910) and situates them within the broader contexts of French colonialism and China’s economic transformation.

She is currently working on her second book, which explores the role of women in China’s war of resistance against Japanese occupation, with special emphasis on alternative models of economic organization and women’s leadership in global conflicts.

Altan received her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2017.