Valerie Hansen

Valerie Hansen's picture
Stanley Woodward Professor of History

Valerie Hansen teaches world and Chinese history at Yale, where she is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (Scribner, 2020) demonstrates that different regions of the world were linked together long before 1492, when many analysts believe the Age of Discovery began. In the year 1000 Viking, Polynesian, and Chinese navigators were all regularly voyaging across oceans, and overland exchanges of goods and enslaved peoples across Afro-Eurasia were common. She is particularly interested in broadening our understanding of the early modern to include the experiences of the Chinese and other non-European peoples.