Dr. Sharon Yam is the winner of the Rhetoric Society of America Fellows' Early Career Award in 2021. Her monograph Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (The Ohio State University Press, Intersectional Rhetorics Series) draws attention to how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. This book is shortlisted for the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award, and is the winner of the 2021 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. She is co-editor of the New Directions in Materiality and Rhetoric series at the Ohio State University Press. 

Her current research and teaching focus on the framework of reproductive justice. Her most recent project adopts the reproductive justice framework to examine how doulas, particularly those who work with marginalized communities, conceptualize and enact advocacy. Her second book, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care (co-authored with Dr. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz), explores how reproductive justice birth workers and queer parents build kinships and care relations that resist oppressive structures.