Yasser Ali Nasser is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of Modern China, with significant interests in East and South Asia more generally. His work explores how people in China and elsewhere understood their struggles at home in relation to similar struggles elsewhere.

His forthcoming book with Stanford University Press, Just Friends: China, India, and the Promise of Asian Solidarity in the Cold War, tells the story of how, from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s, an eclectic group of statesmen, intellectuals, activists, and workers reached across national and ideological divides between India and China in the service of what they called ‘friendship’. Committing to a program of mutual learning and respect for differences, the advocates of Sino-Indian friendship declared that its vision of horizontal international relations and a steadfast commitment to cosmopolitanism stood in stark contrast to the tutelage and discipline associated with bloc politics and imperialism. It was meant to be a model for relations between countries in Asia similarly emerging from war and colonialism. The Indian and Chinese states used this vision of a decolonized Asia to teach domestic audiences about the significance of their work at home, thus rendering international struggles legible to local interests. This helped generate internationalist solidarity between people in both countries, many of whom used the language of friendship to advocate for their own distinct political interests. But this same solidarity also wound up reinforcing chauvinist attitudes and misunderstandings, eventually contributing to the outbreak of war between China and India in 1962. The story of Sino-Indian friendship highlights how Cold War challenges and postcolonial aspirations forged an intimate connection between local, national, and international politics in the Global South.

Yasser is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed articles and public facing essays on the different forms Sino-Indian friendship took, as well as on politics and solidarity in the Global South more generally. His work on these topics appear or are forthcoming in Past & Present, The International Journal of Asian Studies, Twentieth-Century China, Cold War History, The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism, Afro-Asian Visions, and Democratic Left.

Yasser’s research and writing has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the China-US Scholars Program, the Association of Asian Studies, the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and numerous internal sources at the University of Chicago and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

As the recipient of the ACLS Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. Fellowship in 2025, Yasser was on leave AY 25/26 conducting research on his next book project, tentatively titled “Opening the Door: The People’s Republic of China and Global Economic Reform".