Sarah Schneewind

Department of History

University of California, San Diego

9500 Gilman Drive MC 0104

La Jolla , California , 92093-0104

sschneewind@ucsd.edu

(858) 822-0814

H&SS Room: 3062

Curriculum Vitae

Sarah Schneewind holds degrees from Cornell University, Yale University, and Columbia University. She has published two books on the relations between state and society during the Ming era (1368-1644): Community Schools and the State in Ming China, which studies the local implementation of one central policy, and A Tale of Two Melons, which traces the way the first Ming emperor, his advisors, and others wrote about one small lucky omen, and what it meant at the local level. She has also edited a collection of essays on the creation and use of the image of the Ming founder through today, called Long Live the Emperor! She teaches Chinese history up to about 1850, and, in the lower-division survey, Japanese and Korean history through about 1200. She has been President of the Society for Ming Studies, and runs a website called "The Ming History English Translation Project." Her current major project is on shrines to living officials in Ming and what they show about popular involvement in the autocratic, bureaucratic Ming government. She is also interested in the long history of East-West sharing of ideas and things and the related historiography.

Major and Recent Publications

A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China, Hackett Publishers, 2006.
Long Live the Emperor! The Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History. Society for Ming Studies, 2008.
Community Schools and the State in Ming China, Stanford University Press, 2006.
"Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and King Wu’s First Great Pronouncement", Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Issue 19, 2012. This article can be read, free of charge, at this URL (Portable Document Format).
"Clean Politics:Race and Class, Imperialism and Nationalism, Etiquette and Consumption in the Chinese and American Revolutions," The Asia-Pacific Journal, volume 45-3-09.
"Is Ren Gui Really Filial?" Ming Studies 20 (2009): 115-120
"Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: Imperial Autocracy and Scholar-Official Autonomy in the Background to the Ming History Biography of Early Ming Scholar-Official Fang Keqin (1326-1376)," Oriens Extremus 48:103-152.
"The Analects in the Classroom: Book Four as a First Step," Education about Asia. Spring 2011.
"Visions and Revisions: Village Policies of the Ming Founder in Seven Phases, " in T'oung Pao 87 (2002): 1-43.
"Competing Institutions: Community Schools and Improper Shrines' in Sixteenth Century China" in Late Imperial China 20.1 (June 1999): 85-106.

Courses Taught

HILD 10. East Asia: The Great Tradition: Early History and Cultures of China, Korea, and Japan.
HIEA 122. Late Imperial Chinese Culture and Society: Institutions and the Individual.
HIEA 129. Faces of the Chinese Past.
HIEA 164. Seminar in Late Imperial Chinese History.
HIEA 166 Creating Ming Histories.
HITO 196. History Honors Seminar.
HIGR 217A. China Before Buddhism.
HIGR 218A-B.

Poems

"Our Dead"

They said to me:

We keep our dead among us, buried in the fields.
We plough around their mounds;
noontimes, we lie in their shade, chatting.
The occasional spadeful keeps them with us.
In stubble days, goats climb their modest height.

Until in rain and forgetfulness,
a great-grandson's ox ploughs through,
and their bones return to ours.

And I replied:

I keep myself among my dead, their endtables and sofas.
I dust around their tchotchkes;
evenings, I lean against their cushions, chatting.
The occasional mending keeps them with me.
In troubled nights, ghosts strum my modest memories.

Until in a change of fashion's season
some great-granddaughter will plough through,
and donate all our love to charity.

Cumberland Poetry Review, vol. 17.1 (Fall 1997).

Second-place winner of Robert Penn Warren Poetry Competition

"Inspiration"

would leap,
I had thought,
faithfully onto my shoulder
and consecrate my ear
with wild imaginings in regulated verse.

Instead
it meanders down the driveway at a dignified distance
on careful paws
stopping now for a chew of blade,
now to doze in the shade of the barn

or it bleats indignantly,
butting against the fence
of my preoccupations

or shifts under my toes like the scant sand
or prods my feet sharply like the gravel
of this road

or, as it drives by,
waves politely from a beat-up pick-up
leaving me
in a shuffle of dust.

Cumberland Poetry Review 18.1 (Fall 1998)

"The Bride One Summer Evening"

Waiting for the grind of tires, barefoot,
not sure just where I ought to snip, or if,
his rose bushes long planted, long ignored,
I heard an unfamiliar cry and turned

to face the moon. It rose from ruddy clay,
uncanny, earthy, red, full, and so low
my shears could almost reach. Instead I found
the perfect angle for those clean smooth cuts,

goodbyes to last year's unseen crimson blooms.
I severed thorny brown from green to let
red growth replace the woman I had been.
The moon still loomed orange above the pines,

but faded, before he got home, to white.
He said that whippoorwill could whoop all night.

Cumberland Poetry Review 18.1 (Fall 1998)

"Minoan Gold"

Stalactites of honey; catacomb
of waxen hive where generous holy swarms
for centuries have worked in stony womb,

where fragrant humming air each morning warms
and melts for Cretan tongues the ancient stores
each one of us tastes of and never harms

as it seeps from mid-cliff through rocky pores.
So narrow-waisted bees, since Midas' day,
have sweetened this down-trodden people's chores.

A sailor, once, scoffed at our Cretan way,
scaled the hill, and rapelled down to take
a vessel full to sell.

Can insects pray?
The twisted cord became a hissing snake --
or so he shouted, fumbling with his sheath --
and swinging in air he slashed and fell, to break

in screams upon the flowering rock beneath.
Doge, Sultan, Führer: despoilers come
and leave. We live on what the gods bequeath.

Cumberland Poetry Review 18.1 (Fall 1998)

Curriculum Vitae

Major and Recent Publications

Courses Taught

Poems

Faculty