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Valerie Hansen

Valerie Hansen

Professor

(Leave of absence, Academic Year 2008-09)

Office:    HGS 227

Phone:  (203) 432-0480

Email:    valerie.hansen@yale.edu

 

Work History

History Department, Yale University
    • Professor of History 1998-present
    • Associate Professor 1993-1998
    • Assistant Professor 1988-1993

Courses Taught

    Lecture courses
    • Traditional China (2,000 BC - AD 1600)
    • Voyages in World History to 1500
    • The Silk Road Rediscovered
    Seminars
    • Social History of the Chinese Silk Road
    • Issues in Tang, Song, and Yuan history
    • Documents of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties

Books

    • Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276 (Princeton University Press, 1990) argues that social and economic developments underlay the religious changes of the Southern Song. In 1100, nearly all people in south China worshiped gods who had been local residents prior to their deaths. The increasing mobility of cultivators in the lowland, rice-growing regions resulted in the adoption of gods from other places. Cults in isolated mountain regions showed considerably less change.
    • Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400 (Yale University Press, 1995) analyzes the contracts used to buy, sell, rent, exchange, and borrow all commodities, whether land, money, goods, livestock, or people. Land contracts were also placed in tombs to give the dead title to their grave plots as well as to prevent them from being sued in the courts of the underworld. Because contracts were so widely used for all transactions, in this world and the next, this study concludes, they allow a rare glimpse of how ordinary people understood the law.
    • The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000) links the major political events of pre-modern China with social and cultural change. This textbook draws on unconventional sources—archeological sites, paintings, and fiction—to argue that China remained open to outside influences throughout its long history.

Collaborative Research

    • The Silk Road Project: Reuniting Turfan's Scattered Treasures, of which I was the principal investigator, ran from 1995 to 1998. The project focused on the documents and art objects found between 1899 and the present in Turfan, an oasis near the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang province. Plundered and then scattered across Europe and Asia in the years before World War I, many of the treasures of the Silk Road lie in archives or warehouses largely uncataloged and effectively lost to Chinese and Western scholarship. Awarded $170,000 by the Luce Foundation, the Silk Road project brought together a team of twenty-five Chinese and American scholars who drew on the disciplines of archeology, history, art history, and religious studies. Over three years, the project held three international conferences in China and the United States and compiled a bilingual Chinese-English finding guide to over 3,000 artifacts. See the website at: http://research.yale.edu:8084/turfan/

Works in Progress

    • Voyages In World History (with Ken Curtis, under contract to Houghton Mifflin, projected publication 2009) is an introductory textbook. The readers of our book will embark on thirty different journeys—starting with Kennewick man's walk to the New World some 8400 years ago and ending with Nelson Mandela's travels around the world. In between, students will travel to Mesopotamia with Gilgamesh, to Africa and Arabia with a Muslim on the Haj, to Peru with a cross-dressing nun, and to the New World with the slave Equiano. Each chapter will cover the varied effects of increasing contact among civilizations, the changing political structures of empire, the world's religions, and social structure in the different societies of the world.
    • A New History of the Silk Road (awarded NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, under contract with Oxford University Press) presents an integrated political, social, and religious history of the Tarim Basin. A continuing stream of archeological discoveries and philological breakthroughs has re-awakened interest in the Silk Road in recent decades, but no one has attempted to do a synthetic scholarly work about the various sites on both the southern Silk Road—Niya, Endere, Loulan, Kroraina (Shanshan)—and on the northern Silk Road—Kucha and Turfan—and where the two routes converged at Dunhuang. My overall goal is to understand what political, economic, and cultural conditions made the Silk Road flourish.

Articles

Translations

     
    • Rong Xinjiang, "The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing," Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 11 (1999-2000): 247-275.
    • (with Zhang Guangda) Wu Zhen, "'Hu" Non-Chinese as They Appear in the Materials from the Astana Graveyard at Turfan," Sino-Platonic Papers #119, Summer 2002.

Review Articles

   

 

 
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