Staff Profile
Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art
sarah_laursen@harvard.edu / 617-495-2391
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M.A., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., New York University
Sarah Laursen oversees the Chinese art collection as well as parts of the Korean and Central, South, and Southeast Asian collections. She is a specialist in early medieval China, and her research interests include Chinese archaeology, digital humanities, technical art history, collecting history, and contemporary Asian and Asian American art. She curated Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade, co-curated Earthly Delights: 6,000 Years of Asian Ceramics, and worked with students to develop the virtual exhibition Reframing Tianlongshan.
Recent Publications
“Adorned: Gold of the Nomads.” In Golden Grasslands: The Cultural Crossroads of Inner Mongolia, 4th–7th Centuries CE, ed. Clare Fitzgerald. New York: ISAW. Forthcoming.
“The Fringes of Taste: Early Collections of Chinese Gold in Europe and the United States.” In Centering the Periphery: New Perspectives on Collecting East Asia, ed. Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik. Leiden: Routledge, 2023.
“Dressing the Dead in Jin China.” In The Art and Archaeology of Bodily Adornment: Studies from Central and East Asian Mortuary Contexts, ed. Sheri A. Lullo and Leslie V. Wallace. London: Routledge, 2019.
Schoneveld, Erin, and Sarah Laursen. “Representation, Adaptation, and Preservation at the Frontiers in East Asian Art.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 4 (1) (Spring 2018): 44–84.