Professor Yeh conducts research on nature-society relations and development, mostly in Tibetan parts of the PRC. She has written about the political ecology of pastoralism, conflicts over access to natural resources, vulnerability to and knowledge of climate change, the cultural and ontological politics of nature conservation, and the conjunctural production of environmental subjectivities. Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press 2013) explored the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization. She is also co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands and of Rural Politics in Contemporary China, and author of more than 55 articles and chapters. She regularly teaches classes on political ecology, development, environment and society geography, contemporary China, and research design. She served as President of the American Association of Geographers in 2021-22.