Sarah Mellors RodriguezAssociate Professor

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is a historian of China whose work focuses on gender/sexuality, aging, and medicine in modern China. She completed her MA and PhD in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Irvine (2018). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2024, Dr. Rodriguez held the position of Associate Professor of East Asian History at Missouri State University. At Emory, she teaches courses on the histories of modern China, gender and sexuality, and eugenics and population control.

Dr. Rodriguez’s first book, Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. By centering grassroots accounts of birth control use, Reproductive Realities uses archival research and interviews with 80 women and men to investigate local implementation and reception of population policies from the Republican period (1911-1949) to the present. Reproductive Realities was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize Competition.

Her current project, Growing Old: A History of Aging in Global China, investigates how the rollback of the collective-era welfare system, uneven economic development, and inadequate access to healthcare have shaped experiences with aging in China since 1949.

“Between the Communist Bloc and the World: The Politics of Abortion in 1950s China.” The American Historical Review 131, no. 1 (2026): 178-193.

“Constructing the Maoist Sexual Subject: 1950s Hygiene Guides and the Production of Sexual Knowledge.” In How Maoism was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949-1965, edited by Jennifer Altehenger and Aaron Moore, 196-223. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

“IUDs and Their Legacy in China.” In The Nursing Clio Reader, edited by The Nursing Clio Editorial 

Collective, 46-50. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2025.

 “Researching the PRC in Municipal and Provincial Archives.” The PRC History Review 6, no. 3 (2021): 10-11.