About
Rachel is a Senior Postgraduate Teaching Assistant and Graduate Teaching Assistant at UCL and LSE respectively. She is currently under the doctoral supervision of Dr Lily Chang at UCL and holds a LLB in Laws (2015) and MSc in Empires, Colonialism, and Globalisation (2018) from the LSE. She has most recently undertaken archival fieldwork at the Asian Library at Leiden University, the Netherlands, with the support of a UCL research grant. She has also previously served as ARB Spring Research Scholar at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri with the university’s Bernard Becker Medical Library. In 2019, she was a Visiting Tutor at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan ROC.
Rachel’s work situates itself at the intersection of science, intellectual networks, and empire in late imperial China, stretching broadly into the early Republican period. Her research explores the ways in which paradigms around modern education shaped and altered relationships in the emerging new Academy, their Western counterparts, and served to catalyse the dominance of scientised intellectuals as China’s new ruling elite. Her work utilises a vast array of sources in both English and Mandarin Chinese, including missionary records, newspapers, periodicals, personal papers, and institutional documentation.
In academia-adjacent roles, she served as a member of the Women's History Network (WHN) Steering Committee and was Convenor of the Women's History Network's Seminar Series from 2021 to 2023. Other roles include sitting on both the Undergraduate and MA Dissertation Prize Panels with the WHN, and serving as invitational Panel Chair for the 2022 History, Politics, and Law Forum organised by UCL Laws.
Recent academic work includes a research guide, published in collaboration with Adam Matthew Digital (Sage Publishing), on working with Church missionary sources. Other work has analysed the historical narratives of travel writing, focusing on the travelogues of Euro-American women travelling through the Qing empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has previously worked as a lawyer and is very interested in all forms of socio-legal history, gender history, and decolonisation discourses.
Expertise
History of Late Qing and Early Republican China; History of Science; History of Medicine; Women's History; History of Race and Empire; Reproductive History
- ‘Constructed Motherhood: Tradition and Synthesis in Late Imperial China’, Mothering and Motherhood on the Home/Front Conference, International Association of Mothering Action and Scholarship, Chicago, United States, March 2023
- ‘Dr Imaobong Umoren, Keynote Address - Prime Minister Eugenia Charles: Addressing Dominica, the Caribbean, and the World in the age of Decolonisation’, Session Chair, ‘Addressing the Nation’: Women’s History Network Annual Conference, London, September 2022
- ‘Structures and Entanglements of Imperial Legal Ordering’, Panel Chair, History, Politics, and Law: In Conversation, University College London, London, July 2022
- ‘Motherhood, Discourse, and Social Construction’, Women Encountering Emancipation and Adversity Conference, University of Chichester, London, March 2022
- ‘The Ideal Mother: Chinese Women and Christianity in Late Imperial China’, LSE HY509 International History Research Seminar, London School of Economics, London, March 2022
- 'Space, Gender, and Medicine: Chinese Female Doctors in the Late Qing and Early Republican Periods', Women's History Network Spring/Summer Seminar Series, London, June 2021
- 'Pioneers and Professions, or Professional Pioneers: Chinese Women Doctors in the Late Qing and Early Republican Periods', Studying Herstories Conference, Women's History Network, London, March 2021
Research
- UCL Fieldwork Research Grant (2022, 2023)
- ARB Spring Scholar, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University in St Louis (2022)
- Royal Historical Society Adam Matthew Digital Collections Award (2020)
Teaching
Rachel Chua teaches the following courses at undergraduate level:
HY235 - Modernity and the State in East Asia: China, Japan and Korea since 1840
Engagement and impact
- Jamie Tibke, host, "From UCL - Rachel Chua on China, the Qing Empire, Western Missionaries, and the Cultural Revolution," Hardcore Humanities (podcast), 10 April 2021.