H.D. Wright is a writer from Manhattan and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Transnational Politics. His writing has appeared in the International Press Syndicate, the Oxford Political Review,  Harvard's Journal of Middle Eastern Politics, The Paris Globalist, The Armenian Weekly,  and Wanted in Rome. He currently serves as Global Youth Representative at Education Cannot Wait, the U.N. fund for education in emergencies. His election at ECW marks the first example of a young person democratically elected to the governing body of a global humanitarian fund. 

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Henry began building Transnational Politics in the summer of 2018 guided by the works of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said, most prominently Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and Said's Orientalism. Gramsci's definition of hegemony—the cultural and ideological domination of a group of people—illustrated that nations are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas. Using Gramsci's framework of hegemony, Said attacked Western depictions of the Eastern world, arguing that "from the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work." 

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In a world dominated by massive media conglomerates, the most powerful of which are based in the west, it is becoming increasingly difficult for countries outside the west to accurately represent themselves. The Arab world, for example, is often cast as a teeming nest of terrorists, its complexity reduced to a monolith. And in the west, the news cycle is governed by reactive sensationalism, an environment inhospitable and unwelcoming to the opinions of the people. Transnational Politics seeks to not only push back on eurocentrism in global media, but also allow writers to finally humanize themselves and their country's politics to each other, working to remedy Said's diagnosis of definition.

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