Sharon Yam is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, and a faculty affiliate of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the co-series editor for the Ohio State University Press's New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality and Parlor Press's Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. 

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Her research focuses on questions of identity, citizenship, affect, race, and most recently, reproductive justice. She teaches courses on public advocacy, transnational rhetoric, digital composing, and political emotion. 

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Sharon's work has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, enculturation, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Women's Studies in Communication, and Composition Forum. 

 

Her book Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship examines how three transnational groups—mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents—engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives. The book is the winner of the 2021 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2019 RSA Book Award.

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Her most recent book, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care (co-authored with Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz), analyzes how reproductive justice birth workers and queer parents build kinships and care relations that resist oppressive structures.

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Her public scholarship can be found on Hong Kong Free Press, Hong Kong Protesting, Foreign Policy, Lausan, The Asia Dialogue. 

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