Sarah Schneewind graduated from Cornell in 1986, Yale with an MA in 1988, and Columbia with a PhD in 1999. In between she taught English in Jinhua and worked as a grant administrator at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC. She is currently professor emerita of history at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Community Schools and the State in Ming China, A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China, Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos, and The Social Drama of Daily Work: A Manual for Historians (available open access). All have been or will be translated into Chinese. She also wrote an open-access textbook called An Outline History of East Asia to 1200, which comes with additional resources for teachers. She served as President of the Society for Ming Studies and created the Ming History English Translation Project and a digital tool called The Late Imperial Primer Literacy Sieve. During her 2022–23 visit at the MPIWG, she worked with Qiao Yang and the “Ability and Authority” Working Group to publish a special issue of the Journal of Chinese History called "On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China." During her tenure as Visiting Senior Scholar to the MPIWG in 2026–27, she hopes to complete a book tentatively entitled Doorkeepers in Ming Culture and Society as her contribution to exploring the daily work expertise and authority of ordinary people. She will continue to co-lead with Anne Gerritsen and Ying Zhang the UTMOST project (Uncovering Traces of Ming Occupations with Sociological Theory), which will present its results in 18 papers at a final conference May 30–June 1, 2027.
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