Sarah Basham

Sarah Basham is Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS). She earned her PhD in early modern Chinese history from the Department of History at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2019. She has worked as a consumer-trend analyst, as a history instructor at UBC, and as a freelance editor and translator. 

Sarah’s current research wrestles with connections between the history of technology, expertise, books and reading praxis in late-Ming military encyclopedias and correspondence. Her time as a consumer-trend analyst sparked interest in the impact of educational infrastructures on knowledge production both in and outside academia. Her next project explores the integration of global scholarly discourses into undergraduate curricula, especially Chinese area studies in North America.

Select Publications & Translations 

• Basham, Sarah. “The Reader’s Body in Statecraft Texts of Seventeenth-Century Chinese Statecraft Texts: Disorderly Books Ordering Unruly Techniques.” In “Unruly Objects: Material Entanglements in the Arts and Sciences,” edited by Lucia Dacome, Meghan C. Doherty, Dahlia Porter, and Courtney Roby. Nuncius 35, no. 3 (2020), 561–605. 

• Six articles by XU Jilin, LUO Zhitian, DUAN Lian, ZHANG Qing, CHAN Hok Yin, and LI Yuyang in Hon, Tze Ki, ed. "May Fourth After One Hundred Years." Translated by Sarah Basham. Special Issue, Contemporary Chinese Thought 50, no. 1–2 (2019). 

Education

• PhD, History, University of British Columbia

• MA, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania

• BA, East Asian Languages and Civilizations & Health and Societies, University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests

• Late imperial China (Ming/Qing dynasties)

• History of the book

• History of science, technology, and medicine

• Translation and power

• Global scholarly discourse and undergraduate education