Sara Newland is an Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College and a scholar of local politics in China and Taiwan. She has conducted research on public goods and services in rural China, collaboration between civil society organizations and the local state, local government responsiveness in Taiwan, ethnic politics, and political science pedagogy.
Her research has been published in China Quarterly (2016, 2018) and The Journal of Political Science Education (2019). She is also the coeditor, with Vinod Aggarwal, of Responding to China’s Rise: US and EU Strategies (Springer, 2014). She teaches courses on China, East Asia, comparative politics, and political economy. She is an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. Previously, she was an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University and a China public policy postdoctoral fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.