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. An early iteration of this research focusing on the writings of Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle was included in Gems in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Her research in the UK, Netherlands, Indonesia and India in 2022-23 is supported by 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. She has also been a contributing researcher to the Natural Things project at Stanford University, and a former Delmas Junior Fellow at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden.

She is developing a second project with artist Alix Pentecost-Farren, a micro-history of an eighteenth century amateur female naturalist in Britain, with support from 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. She co-leads the Science Beyond the West working group at Penn which meets regularly to discuss 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.