Sara Sterling

Sara Sterling is a lecturer in the XJTLU Department of Industrial Design. She completed her BA in History and Economics (cum laude) at Fordham University, in New York City. From there, she went on to complete Masters Degrees in both European Studies (cum laude) and Social and Cultural Anthropology (Magna cum laude) from the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. She completed her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2010 from the same institution, writing a Doctoral Thesis entitled "Becoming Chinese: Ethnic Chinese-Venezuelan Education Migrants and the Construction of Chineseness".

Her experience on the issues of Chinese identity, migration and consumption led to a position as a post-doctoral researcher in Center for Chinese Entrepreneur Studies (CCES) in the Institute of Economics at Tsinghua University, from 2011-2013. She has published papers in multiple internationally peer-reviewed journals across several disciplines, including Asian Anthropology, and Language and Intercultural Communication and Built Environment. She is currently interested in the interactions between design and anthropology, and the development of the culture of objects, with particular regard to ritual connotations.