Sarah Schneewind

Sarah Schneewind is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in Chinese history with a focus on the Ming Dynasty. She has made significant contributions to the fields of historical sociology, textual analysis, and translation studies.

Dr. Schneewind received her BA from Cornell in 1986, MA from Yale in 1988, and PhD from Columbia in 1999. Between her graduate studies, she taught English in Jinhua, China, and worked as a grant administrator at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.

Her research focuses on Ming Dynasty China, particularly examining political institutions, social structures, and cultural practices through the lens of historical sociology. Recent work has explored occupational sociology frameworks applied to historical contexts, doorkeepers' knowledge and authority in Ming China, and ability and authority in sixteenth-century family admonitions. She has pioneered digital approaches to analyzing historical texts and steles.

Dr. Schneewind has served as President of the Society for Ming Studies and is the founder of Ming In Southern California. She currently runs the Ming History English Translation Project, which has significantly advanced accessibility to Ming historical materials for English-speaking scholars.

• Community Schools and the State in Ming China
• A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China (Hackett, 2006)
• Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

During the 2022-2023 academic year, Dr. Schneewind was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she completed significant portions of her work on occupational sociology frameworks and doorkeepers' authority in Ming China. She also participated as a discussant in the 2023 workshop Empire under the Night Sky organized by the Fenye in Local Gazetteers Working Group.