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 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, and Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos. She has served as President of the Society for Ming Studies, runs the Ming History English Translation Project, and founded Ming In Southern California. Her project at the MPIWG this year involves applying the Hughes framework of occupational sociology developed at the University of Chicago in the twentieth century to occupations (work) in China during the Ming period (1368–1644) and reaching back a bit to Yuan.