Patricia Sieber’s primary research interests center on the canon formation, print culture, and cultural translation surrounding early Chinese mixed-register genres both in China and in transnational contexts. 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-dramas." She is the lead editor of How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022) (with Regina S. Llamas) and a co-editor of How To Read Chinese Drama in Chinese: The Language Text (under advance agreement with Columbia University Press) (with Guo Yingde, Wenbo Chang, and Xiaohui Zhang). She is also the guest-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture entitled "The Protean World of Sanqu Songs". In addition, her essays on early song-drama and sanqu songs have appeared in The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu's China, The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Biography, CHINOPERL, Journal of Chinese Religion, and Ming Studies among others. She recently received a grant from the OSU Arts and Humanities Large Grant Program to build the prototype of a digital resource center entitled Digital Chinese Theater Collaborative (with Maria Palazzi, Leigh Bond, and Marjorie Chan).

In terms of translation, she is a 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 Europe in Representations, East Asian Publishing and Society, Towards a History of Translating and Sinologists as Translators from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries. She currently serves as the T&I program director at OSU and is the recipient of a Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme grant for a T&I-focused GAAship. To learn more about the current initiatives under the auspices of that program, see here.

Other research interests include the uses of Buddhism in literature as evidenced by work published in The Magnitude of Ming, Monumenta Serica, Journal of Chinese Religions and Contemporary Buddhism. She is also known as 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 DEALL, she teaches courses on different facets of traditional Chinese literature, including courses on traditional Chinese novels & drama, the intersection of traditional & modern Chinese literature, literary translation, and Buddhism. She also regularly teaches 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).

Her research has been awarded funding from the NEH, ACLS, DAAD, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation 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, Russia, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She has been interviewed about Chinese literature by The New York Times, the BBC World Service as well as by local media.

She is the associate editor for East Asian Publishing and Society and a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Chinese Literature: Articles, Essays, and Reviews, Monumenta Serica, and Contemporary Buddhism. 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). Her local arts outreach has been supported by BETHA, OSU Arts and Humanities Research Collaborative Grant, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. Internationally, she has been involved with intercultural projects of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.