Valerie Hansen

Valerie Hansen (born 1958) is an American historian. She is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches Chinese and world history and studies the Silk Road and the religious and legal history of premodern China. Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800 (2015), and The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (2020).

Early life and education Hansen graduated from Kent School in 1975 and from Harvard University in 1979, where she received an A.B. magna cum laude in East Asian studies. She then studied Chinese at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study in Taipei from 1979 to 1981, and was a Fulbright-Hays fellow at Kyoto University from 1984 to 1986.

From 1995 to 1998, Hansen was principal investigator of the Silk Road Project: Reuniting Turfan's Scattered Treasures, a collaboration of twenty-five Chinese and American scholars funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. The project compiled a bilingual Chinese–English finding guide to more than 3,000 documents and artifacts removed from the Turfan oasis by expeditions before World War I and dispersed among collections in Europe and Asia. While researching and working on her book, The Year 1000, she held visiting positions at Xiamen University, the University of Birmingham, and the Collège de France, where she was an invited lecturer in 2019. Her second book, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600–1400 (1995), used surviving contracts (including land contracts buried in tombs) to study how ordinary people understood the law.

In 2000, she published The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, a textbook arguing, against the view that outsiders never influenced traditional China, that Indian Buddhists and northern nomadic peoples shaped China throughout its history. A second edition appeared in 2015. With Kenneth R. Curtis, she also wrote the world-history textbook Voyages in World History, first published in 2010 and as of 2026 in its fourth edition. Oxford University Press released an expanded classroom edition in 2017, The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, containing fifty-two primary sources in translation.