Claire Sabel

Claire Conklin Sabel is a doctoral candidate in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the relationship between the earth sciences, empire, and global trade in the early modern period. At the MPIWG she is working on her dissertation project, a history of the gem trade between South and Southeast Asia and western Europe during the seventeenth century, and its relationship to methods and questions for understanding the composition of the earth. In 2022–2023 she received a Fuulbright-Hays Fellowship to conduct archival research in the Dutch and English East India Company archives in Indonesia, India, the UK, and the Netherlands. She has published essays about the gem trade and its relationship to environmental knowledge in Michael Bycroft and Sven Dupré ed. Gems in the Early Modern World (Palgrave, 2019), and Alison Bashford, Emily Kern, and Adam Bobbette ed. New Earth Histories (Chicago, 2023).