Supporting Outstanding Faculty

February 20, 2023

In October 2018, Cemil Aydin (fourth from left) spoke at the Syria in Transition event held by Carolina Public Humanities and the UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Aydin was joined by Hiba Alzouby (Pharm.D. ’21, fourth from right) and Kamel Alachraf (second from right) as well as several Syrian refugees for a panel discussion about the global significance of the Syrian war and refugee migration.

Recruiting, retaining and supporting outstanding faculty members is vital to the College of Arts and Sciences’ success in staying at the cutting edge of teaching and scholarship. There are more than 1,000 tenured, tenure-track and fixed-term faculty in the College, and they teach the majority of credit hours at Carolina.

Forty-six percent of College faculty receive some form of philanthropic support. Cemil Aydin, professor of history and religious studies, is one such faculty member. Aydin was the recipient of support from the Clein Family Initiative in Global and Islamic History through the department of history from 2019–2021. Mark Clein ’81 established this fund during the Campaign for Carolina to provide support for faculty and graduate students working in the areas of Islamic and global history. Clein also made significant commitments to two other faculty and graduate student support funds in the department of history during the campaign.

“Supporting faculty and graduate students is symbiotic. They fuel each other to advance teaching and research,” said Clein. “Stellar graduate students help departments recruit and retain top-tier faculty and vice versa. I appreciate the opportunity to support the incredible work of faculty members like Cemil and to see the impact they are having on Carolina and beyond.”

Also established during the campaign, thanks to the support of alumnae from the Kappa Delta sorority, was the Kappa Delta Faculty Excellence Fund. They met their initial goal of $50,000 to officially establish the faculty excellence fund and Professor Aydin was the inaugural recipient of funding in the 2022-2023 academic year. Aydin’s research and teaching focuses on modern Middle Eastern and Asian history, with an emphasis on the international and intellectual histories of the Ottoman and Japanese Empires. He teaches courses such as “The World Since 1945,” “History of the Ottoman Empire” and “Comparative Empires in the Modern World.” As the Kappa Delta Fund continues to grow through additional gifts and endowment earnings, distribution amounts will increase in future years, further expanding Kappa Delta’s impact on the mission of recruiting, retaining and supporting outstanding faculty members like Aydin.