Please join Beloit College for a public lecture by Valerie Hansen, teacher, author and professor  as she delivers a public lecture titled " The Silk Road: A New History."

This event is free and open to the campus and community.

BIO

Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history.

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. Her books include The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Voyages in World History (coauthor), and, just published in the summer of 2012, The Silk Road: A New History.

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. She was the principal investigator, from 1995 to 1998, of The Silk Road Project: Reuniting Turfan’s Scattered Treasures. The project held three international conferences and compiled a bilingual Chinese-English finding guide to over 3,000 artifacts.