Sarah Eaton

Sarah B. Eaton (simplified Chinese: 伊顿·萨拉; traditional Chinese: 伊頓·薩拉; pinyin: Yīdùn Sàlā) is a Canadian political scientist and sinologist specialising in the political economy of China. Since 2019, she is Professor of Transregional Chinese Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Education and career

Eaton studied at Mount Allison University (B.A. Political Science, 1997–2001), McMaster University (M.A. Political Science, 2002–2004) and the University of Toronto (Ph.D. International Relations and Comparative Politics of Developing Countries with a focus on China, 2004–2011). From June 2006 until January 2007, she was a student in the Inter-University Program (administered by the University of California, Berkeley) at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She spent eighteen months as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (January 2008 to July 2009) and ten months at Renmin University of China (September 2009 to July 2010). She obtained her PhD in 2011 with a thesis on the political economy of China's transition to state capitalism.

After obtaining her Ph.D., Eaton worked as research fellow and assistant professor at the China Center of the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo. In 2014, she became Professor of Modern Chinese Society and Economy at the Center for Modern East Asian Studies of the University of Göttingen which she later also headed as director from 2016 to 2019. In 2019, she became Professor of Transregional China Studies at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Together with Genia Kostka from the Free University of Berlin, Eaton launched the Berlin Contemporary China Network in 2021.