About
Rachel is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), where she has previously taught modules on East Asian history and empire. Her work explores intersections between the history of science, public history, and cultural heritage in twentieth-century China, with particular attention to archaeology, palaeontology, and museological legacies. Her work draws on bilingual archival sources and fieldwork, most recently undertaken in Leiden and supported over the years with the generous help of UCL, the Royal Historical Society, and Washington University in St. Louis. Rachel received her PhD in History from University College London (UCL) and attained both her MSc in Empires, Colonialism, and Globalisation (International History) and her LLB in Laws from the LSE.
She has 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. 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.
She is currently working on two books for publication. The first, Seeing Modern China, A Visual History 1839-1925 is a general audience, public history volume under contract with Post Wave Publishing UK and is expected to be published in the latter half of 2027. The second is her academic monograph, titled The Bones of History: Peking Man and the Making of Modern Chinese Cultural Heritage, which is forthcoming in 2028 as part of Venice University Press’s Marco Polo series on Global Europe-Asia Connections. The manuscript for The Bones of History was awarded a highly competitive publication grant from Ca’Foscari University of Venice and was shortlisted for the 2026 British Association of Chinese Studies (BACS) Doctoral Thesis Prize.
Other 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 Details
Late Qing and Republican China, Socio-Cultural History of Science, Critical Heritage Studies, Public History, History of Empires and Colonialism, Museum and Heritage Studies
- ‘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)
Engagement and impact
2026: Doctoral Thesis Prize (Shortlist), British Association for Chinese Studies
2023-2024, 2024-2025, and 2025-2026: Highly Commended Departmental Tutor, LSE Teaching Awards
2022: ARB Spring Research Scholar, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University in St Louis
2021-2022: Adam Matthew Digital Award, Royal Historical Society
- Jamie Tibke, host, "From UCL - Rachel Chua on China, the Qing Empire, Western Missionaries, and the Cultural Revolution," Hardcore Humanities (podcast), 10 April 2021.