He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and his B.A. from Cornell University. Wilder is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, October 2005), which analyzes France between the world wars as an imperial nation-state. At HRP, Wilder worked on the role of transnational groups of semi-private mercenaries, both military and financial, in France and Francophone Africa since decolonization and the novel forms of postcolonial imperialism that are developing today.