Historian Ken Hammond first traveled to China in 1982 to study the language and stayed for five years. A professor at New Mexico State University, he directs a Chinese-American university exchange program. He has produced a documentary on the revival of Confucian ritual and recorded a lecture series covering 5,000 years of Chinese history. Ken served as president of the Society for Ming Studies and as a visiting scholar at the History Institute of the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences.