Will Hanley is a legal and social historian of the Middle East. He is associate professor of history at Florida State University. He studied at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Toronto, and Oxford before taking his doctorate in history at Princeton. His first book, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria, was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. He is currently working on a Cairo-centered history of international law between 1870 and 1930.

Will is also engaged in a variety of digital projects, including a historical names database, a digital gazetteer of the Ottoman empire, and lessons on linked open databases and ontologies for the Programming Historian. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Forum Transregionale Studien, the DAAD, and the Institute for Advanced Study.