Ling received her doctorate from Cambridge University. She was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard University and a post-doctoral fellow in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale University. She studies the historical entanglement of environment, economy, and politics in middle-period China through the lenses of political economy, political ecology, and environmental politics and justice. Beside her first book Making a Yellow River Delta: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2016), she works on two book projects: “North China during the Medieval Economic Revolution” and “China’s Sorrow or the Yellow River’s Sorrow: Environmental Biographies of a Water Regime."