Madeleine Zelin (University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. 1979) is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies and director of the East Asian National Resource Center at Columbia University.  She served as director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute in 1992-93 and from 1995-2001. She teaches modern Chinese history as well as a variety of courses focusing on Chinese legal history and China's early modern social and economic transformation. Professor Zelin's research has taken her to archives and cities throughout China, where she has explored China’s historical process of state-building, elite formation, business organization and investment, and the development of early modern customary and statutory law governing private transactions. In addition to her numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of  The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth  Century Ch'ing China (1984), the English translator of Mao Dun’s Rainbow (1992) and co-editor and author of Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China (2003).  Her most recent book, The Merchants Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (2005) was awarded the Alan Sharlin Memorial Prize of the Social Science History Association, the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS).  She is currently working on a book on the cultural, political and economic forces that shaped China’s early twentieth century civil law reforms.