Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is a specialist on Southeast Asia and has conducted extensive research in Indonesia and the Philippines in particular. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999); (with Eva-Lotta Hedman) Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (Routledge, 2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007); (with Jaime Faustino) Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (The Asia Foundation, 2019), and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021).