Cemil Aydın is professor of global history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research concerns both modern Middle Eastern history and modern Asian history, with an emphasis on the international and intellectual histories of the Ottoman and Japanese Empires. His previous research has focused on historical processes that shape transnational racial and civilizational identities, such as Muslim, Asian, African. He is the author of the The Idea of the Muslim World (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2007).