Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale University. Her main research goal is to draw on nontraditional sources to capture the experience of ordinary people. In particular, she is interested in how sources buried in the ground, whether intentionally or unintentionally, supplement the detailed official record of China's past. She is also the author of The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (2000); Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China (1995); and Voyages in World History (co-authored with Kenneth R. Curtis in 2010). In the past decade, she has spent three years in China: 2005-06 in Shanghai on a Fulbright grant, and 2008-09 and 2011-12 teaching at Yale's joint undergraduate program with Peking University.