Valerie Hansen teaches world and Chinese history at Yale, where she is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History. She works with both archeological materials and written historical sources. Her books include: The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800 (2015) and The Silk Road: A New History with Documents (2016). Her most recent work, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020), has been translated into thirteen languages.