A product of Cold War projects in the U.S. to study “our enemies,” Lynda Bell started studying Chinese language in a high school pilot program in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1963. In time, her early opportunity to learn Chinese propelled her in odd directions, at least in the context of the 1960s and early 1970s. She majored in Asian Studies at Washington University, where she also became an activist against the Vietnam War and graduated in the spring of the Kent State tragedy, experiences that influenced a “wait and see” attitude about graduate school. Eventually, she made her way back to academia at UCLA, and was one of the first seven American graduate students to conduct research in China under the auspices of the National Academy of Science beginning in early 1979, when the U.S. finally ended 30 years of “non-recognition” of the government of the PRC. Intrigued by the history of the Chinese revolution, and also by the everyday life of the peasantry, Bell’s research has focused on revoltionary politics, changing class relations, and the political economy of the countryside. She also has a strong predilection for studying peasant women’s lives, with a special focus on peasant women and work. Major publications include One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937 (Stanford University Press, 1999), and Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism (with Andrew J. Nathan and Ilan Peleg, Columbia University Press, 2001). New work in progress includes a book-length manuscript on the politics of peasant women’s work during the 1950s, tentatively entitled Women and the Nation in Mao’s China.