Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and director of the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He has been a Harvard College professor and is currently a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow. He came to Harvard in 1985 after studying at University of Leiden and Princeton. His books include Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China, Ways with Words, and Neo-Confucianism in History. He directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for China's history, with the goal of integrating geographical knowledge and analysis into historical research, and the China Biographical Database project, a collaboration between Peking University, the Institute of History at Academia Sinica, and Harvard, which currently has 48,000 biographies and aims eventually to include all biographical records in China's history.