Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern East Asia, University College London
Director of Centre of Central and East Asian Studies
Historian of the Qing Empire, Inner Asian frontiers, material culture, and imperial medicine. Member of the ERC GloCoBank project, University of Oxford. Associated Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Goal: Solve Inequality.
Nora is a historian of modern East Asia whose research spans the social, economic, and cultural history of the Qing Empire and its successor states from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. She works across twelve languages, with particular attention to Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan primary sources alongside Chinese, Japanese, and European archival materials. Her interests include material culture, imperial medicine and dietetics, legal pluralism on the Inner Asian frontiers, and the origins of East Asian financial systems.
She holds a permanent position at the Department of History, University College London as Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Modern East Asia History since 2024, and directs the Centre for Central and East Asian Studies. She is a member of the European Research Council funded GloCoBank project at the University of Oxford, having completed her postdoctoral fellowship there in 2023. She received her Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics (2022), an M.Sc. in Economic History (Research) from LSE (2018), and a B.A. cum laude, honour thesis in Economics & History, minors in Mathematics, East Asian Studies, German Studies, and Music, Mount Holyoke College (2017).
She is an Associated Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Association for Asian Studies, the American Historical Association, the Economic History Society, the European Association for Chinese Studies, the British Association for Chinese Studies, and the American Legal History Association.
Languages: Chinese, Classical Chinese, English, German, Japanese; reading Manchu, Mongolian, Classical Tibetan, Russian, Malay, Arabic, Latin. Digital skills: STATA, R, Python, QGIS.
A native speaker of Chinese, Nora reads and works in twelve languages across East Asian, Inner Asian, and European traditions.
Her Japanese was developed through intensive study at Amherst College with Prof. Wako Tawa (2015) and further refined at LSE (2018–2019). She has studied Manchu continuously for six years, training under Dr. Lars Laamann at SOAS, Prof. He Bian (2021), and Prof. Zhang Li, who spent forty years in the Manchu section of the First Historical Archive of China. Her reading competence in Classical Tibetan was developed at SOAS (2019–2021) with Charles Manson, subject librarian for Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. She has additional training in Classical Mongolian (SOAS, 2023–2024), Arabic (Oxford, 2023–2024), and Malay (SOAS, 2024–2025), and is currently pursuing further Central Asian languages through the University of Kansas (2025–2027).
In European languages, she holds C1 reading proficiency in German, developed at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Mannheim (2016), with additional training in Medieval German under Prof. Oliver Volckart at LSE (2017). She reads Latin and Russian, the latter acquired through LSE's intensive programme (2021–2022).
An investigation of the metabolic intersection of global trade, material culture, dietetics, and imperial governance.
A study of legal and administrative diversity across the Qing Inner Asian frontiers, with attention to Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim communities.
Tracing the development of banking and correspondent networks in East Asia.
Qiu, Yitong. "Power and Identity in the Qing Empire: A Study of Manchu and Han Elite Material Culture Through Confiscation Inventories." Journal of Asian Studies (February 2026).
Qiu, Yitong. "Dress, Power, and Identity in the Qing Empire: An Investigation of Dress Ownership Found in the Confiscation Inventories." Central Asiatic Journal (2026).
Qiu, Yitong, and Tang, Xiaoyun. "Disciplining the State: Confiscation and Strategic Governance in Late Imperial Qing China." Past and Present (Oxford University Press).
Qiu, Yitong, with Bas Van Leeuwen. "China in Times of Change: Household Accounts of Shandong Qingdao Stage Manager 1955–2001." China Quarterly.
Qiu, Yitong. "The Emperor's Remedy: Medicinal Gift-Giving and Politics of Ping'an Pills in Qing China." Itinerario special issue.
Qiu, Yitong. "Food and Dietetics." Chapter in Cambridge History of Medicine.
Qiu, Yitong. "Ruling and Healing: Managing Health and Empire in Qing China 1644–1912." T'oung Pao.
Qiu, Yitong. "Modernizing the Empire: Banking and Currency Reforms in Late Qing China, 1850–1912." Journal of Chinese History.
Qiu, Yitong, Tang, Xiaoyun, and Lyu, Sining. "Confiscation as Governance: Imperial Sanctions and Elite Networks in Qing China." The American Political Science Review.
Qiu, Yitong, and Tang, Xiaoyun. "Cross-border Correspondent Banking Networks: Global Patterns and China's Strategic Integration 1920–2005." Financial History Review.
Qiu, Yitong, and Catherine Schenk. "Payments Across Financial Sanctions: The Case of Shanghai Commercial Bank in Hong Kong, 1949–65." In Cross-border Payment Systems in Historical Perspective, ed. Catherine Schenk and Marianna Astore.
Hatase, Mariko, Yitong Qiu, and Catherine Schenk. "Japanese Correspondent Banking in the 20th Century: Strategy and Structure." In Cross-border Payment Systems in Historical Perspective, ed. Catherine Schenk and Marianna Astore.
"Credit, Correspondents, and Urban Finance: Shanghai and Tianjin's Global Correspondent Networks, 1920–1949." Book chapter in Crisis, Credibility, and Institutional Practice in East Asia (2029).
"Correspondent Banking and China's Financial Market Integration, 1970–2000." Book chapter in Crisis, Credibility, and Institutional Practice in East Asia (2029).
"From Oasis Lords to Imperial Subjects: Confiscation and the Erosion of the Turkic Elite in Qing China," with Jonathan Lipman. Target: American Historical Review.
"Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank 1915–1970," with Xiaoyun Tang.
"Trade-war, Diplomacy, and Border Control in Qing-Russian Relations."
"Guilds, Social Mobility, and Migration in Qing China," with Patrick Wallis.
Review of Akcetin and Faroqhi, eds., Living the Good Life (Brill, 2018). Bulletin of Academic Sinica, Vol. 109: 139–147.
Review of Moazzin, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China (Cambridge UP). The Economic History Review (2023): 1364–1365.
Review of Wong, Legal Pluralism in Qing China (Brill, 2024). Law and History Review.
Review of Kent, Coercive Commerce (HKU Press, 2024). Asian Studies Review.
Review of Schonebaum, Observing the Unseen (U of Washington Press). American Historical Review.
Music has been part of Nora's life for as long as history has. She has played piano for over twenty years and picked up the violin six years ago, and somewhere in between, formed a rock band in high school and joined violin and African drumming ensembles at Mount Holyoke. She has performed Gahu and Ewe-rooted dance from Ghana and Togo, and more recently taken up the Arabic oud, drawn to its microtonal scales that sit entirely outside Western and Chinese musical traditions.
Off the stage and on the range, Nora is a Purple Star modern archer with a scoring record of 575/600. She also practises Qing style archery, a fitting complement to her research, and holds herself to the Master Archer standard: every arrow a disciplined strike to the centre.