Patricia Sieber is a literary historian with research interests in print culture, performance culture, and translation studies. Her primary research is centered around traditional Chinese performance genres and their global afterlives. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), a cross-cultural history of the construction and reception of "Yuan zaju song-drama.”  She is the lead editor of How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022) (with Regina Llamas) and co-editor of How To Read Chinese Drama in Chinese: A Language Companion (Columbia University Press, 2023) (with Guo Yingde, Wenbo Chang, and Xiaohui Zhang). To complement these print volumes, she founded a digital companion resource center entitled “Chinese Theater Collaborative/華語戲聚 and currently co-edits it together with Dr. Julia Keblinska with additional support from Dr. Leigh Bonds (OSU University Libraries) and a team of student assistants. The site features over 30 modules on the multimedia afterlives of classical Chinese plays that have been authored by successive cohorts of undergraduates, graduate students, and recent PhDs from OSU and other universities around the US and Canada. 

Sieber is also the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture entitled "The Protean World of Sanqu Songs" (2021); a select number of the articles from that issue have since appeared in the Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies (2023). In addition, her essays on sanqu songs, zaju theater, and drama criticism have been published in Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, Games and Play in Chinese and Sinophone Cultures, The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (here and here), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China,  Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Biography, CHINOPERL, and Ming Studies among others. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled Dreams of a Common Language: Song Culture in Mongol China, 1200-1400 among other projects.

In terms of translation, Sieber is the co-editor of Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600-1900 (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) (with Li Guo and Peter Kornicki). She has also published articles and book chapters on the transnational fate of mixed-register Chinese belles lettres in early modern Europe in Representations, East Asian Publishing and Society, and Sinologists as Translators from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries. Since 2020, she has served as the inaugural director for OSU’s Translation and Interpreting Program, from which over 40 undergraduate students have earned the Translation & Interpreting Certificate (spring 2025).

Other research interests include the relationship between religious thought and literature, particularly with regard to Buddhism and Christianity. Sieber’s essays in The Magnitude of Ming, Monumenta Serica, and Journal of Chinese Religions explore the use of Buddhism in Jin Shengtan’s literary practice; her essay in Towards a History of Translating explores the important role of different Catholic missionaries in the early modern European diffusion of Chinese fiction and drama. She is also the editor of a widely used collection of contemporary Chinese women's short stories entitled Red Is Not the Only Color (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) and has contributed to the Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature.

In 2023, she won the OSU College of Arts and Sciences’ Ronald and Deborah Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching. In DEALL, she teaches courses on different facets of traditional Chinese literature, including courses on traditional Chinese drama & fiction, the intersection of traditional & modern Chinese literature, and literary translation. She has also regularly taught two of the core courses for the undergraduate Translation and Interpreting Certificate, CLLC 5102 (Introduction to Literary Translation) and CLLC 5103 (Translation and Interpreting Practicum). In her teaching, she encourages students to foster career-readiness with relevant practicum placements, to work towards publishable translations either collectively or individually and/or develop cutting-edge research projects. Since 2023, she has also spearheaded an annual “Summer Translation Collaborative” workshop, an experiential learning opportunity centered around the exploration of traditional Chinese drama (together with Amy Ng (2023) and with Dr. Julia Keblinska (2024 and 2025).

Sieber’s research has been awarded funding from the NEH, ACLS, DAAD, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and various OSU funding bodies among others. She has been a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library (Taipei), at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Princeton University Library, and at the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (OSU). She has presented her research in academic contexts in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. She has been interviewed about Chinese literature by The New York Times, the BBC World Service as well as local media. She was also involved with the intercultural projects of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Sieber is the associate editor for East Asian Publishing and Society (Brill) where she has facilitated special issues on Christian print culture in China (2022) as well as on the early modern Chinese media ecology (2024). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Duke University Press), Chinese Literature: Articles, Essays, and Reviews (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Monumenta Serica (S.V.D, St. Augustin), and Contemporary Buddhism (Taylor & Francis). 

As a two-time recipient of OSU's East Asian Studies Center National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the U.S. Department of Education, she directed OSU's East Asian Studies Center (2005-2013) and the Institute for Chinese Studies (2005-2010).