Zan Tao, is a professor in the Department of History at Peking University, mainly engaged in Turkish history and Middle East studies. His is the author Modern State and Nation Building: A Study on Turkish Nationalism in the Early 20th Century, From Osmanli to Türkiye, and From Baghdad to Istanbul. He is the Vice President of the Institute of Area Studies and the Director of the Center for Turkish Studies at Peking University. He previously worked in School of Literature at Tibet University from August 2010 to August 2011, and in the Department of Sociology at Peking University as a postdoctoral researcher from 2007 to 2009.