Claire Sabel works on the relationship between global commerce and the earth sciences in the early modern period, with a focus on the trade in mineral commodities. Her dissertation investigates how the Indian Ocean gem-trade influenced knowledge of the earth in both Southeast Asia and Europe. Her research focusing on the writings of Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle was included in Gems in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and on the requests for minerals at the 17th c. court of Ayutthaya was published in New Hearth Histories (Chicago, 2024).

In spring 2024 she is a pre-doctoral fellow in Dept II at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her research in the UK, Netherlands, Indonesia and India in 2022-23 was awarded a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and a National Science Foundation DDRIG grant. Her work has also been supported by the Huntington Library, Folger Library, the Geological Society of America, the Lisa Jardine grant of the Royal Society in London, CHSTM and the Science History Institute. 

She is also interested in the ways that women's participation in early modern economic life offered opportunities to cultivate knowledge about the natural world. She is developing a second project along these lines based on microhistorical case studies. An exploratory effort investigating 18th century female fossil collector involves collaborating with artist Alix Pentecost-Farren (whose illustration is featured in the background of the above profile photo) and received Penn's Sachs Program in Arts Innovation, and a GAPSA-Provost Interdisciplinary Innovation fellowship.

In addition to her research, she is particularly interested in the role that histories of science, technology, and medicine play in secondary and higher education in history and STEM. From 2017-2020, she co-led the Science Beyond the West working group at Penn which addressed issues of pedagogy, historiography, methods and sources. Before coming to Penn, she was a Research Associate with the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia (see our contribution to Reassembling Scholarly Communications (MIT, 2020), an intern with AAAS's Scientific Responsibility program, and Project Manager for Columbia's Center for Science and Society and History in Action initiative.