Carmen Thong obtained her PhD in English at Stanford University, where she also earned an MA in Public Policy. She is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, and Mellon Dissertation Fellow. Her work spans postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and the sociology of literature.

Her articles have appeared in MLQ, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Medical Humanities, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (forthcoming). She is also a contributor to the edited volume World Literature in Motion (Columbia UP, 2020) and co-editor and co-author of UNESCO's The African Book Industry.

Her current project uses network models to examine how postcolonial novels are "discovered" within the global literary supply chain.