Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, blogger, and Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His intellectual and research interests include South Asian history, comparative colonial histories, the politics of knowledge systems, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thought of Mohandas Gandhi. His 20 some authored and edited books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi (Penguin, 2005); Political Hinduism (Oxford, 2009); the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013); and The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (Pan Macmillan India, 2020). He is a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics and the editor of its book series from Oxford, including India and the Unthinkable (2016), India and Civilizational Futures (2019), and India and Its Intellectual Traditions (forthcoming, 2023).