Sarah Basham
Office Hours
MW 3pm to 4pm, or by appointmentThematic Research Area
Regional Research Area
Education
Ph.D., University of British Columbia, 2019
MA East Asian Languages and Civilizations, UPenn 2011
BA EALC, Health and Societies, UPenn 2010
About
Sarah Basham is a UBC History PhD alum and sessional instructor. She has one foot in the world of industry, scholarly translation, and editing, and another in the world of academia. In the fall, she’ll be a Global Perspectives on Society post-doctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai, before returning to Vancouver in summer 2024. She is always excited to talk to students about career ideas and navigating UBC.
Teaching
Research
Dr. Basham’s past research revolved around the transmission of technical ideas in Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) encyclopedic books. Her PhD dissertation applied the methods of book historians to the study of military information and its organization in the late Ming. The dissertation offers Mao Yuanyi’s (1594–1640) Treatise on Military Preparedness (Wu bei zhi, 1621), a military encyclopedia, as a case study of Ming practices of technical knowledge production. It argues that social practices and reading practices of the author and readers collectively produced technical meaning and made this book into both a coherent whole, and a fragmented, multi-meaning-ed object that changed over time. The dissertation is in the process of turning into its own multi-meaning-ed, fragmented work, as it is pulled apart and reassembled into a first book.
Dr. Basham’s current research examines differences between educational structures and associated scholarly discourses, methods, and narratives in humanist studies of premodern China across the globe, focusing on those in North America and mainland China. She is especially interested in cross-Pacific scholarly and pedagogical communication.
Research Interests:
Late imperial China
History of science and medicine
History of the book
Publications
Basham, S. (2019). “The Book Multiple : Treatise on Military Preparedness (1621) and Encyclopedic Practice in Seventeenth-Century China.” Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 2008+. T, University of British Columbia. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0383399.
Basham, S. (2020). The Reader’s Body in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Statecraft Texts. Nuncius 35, 3, 561-605, Available From: Brill https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-03503006 [Accessed 17 June 2023]