Dr. Nora Yitong Qiu

Nora is a historian of modern East Asia whose work examines how states and empires governed through the material organisation of everyday life. Her scholarship treats governance as a historical relation between institutional ambition and the worlds that they sought to order. This inquiry runs through her work on Qing material culture, imperial medicine, legal pluralism, borderland administration, household accounts, and financial networks. She works across twelve languages, with particular attention to Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan primary sources alongside Chinese, Japanese, and European archival materials.

She is preparing three books. The Qing Way: Material Culture, Identity, and Gendered Life in Late Imperial China with Cornell University Press. Encounters: The Qing Empire in 50 Objects is under contract with Routledge. The Manchu State in Its Own Words, a textbook and sourcebook designed to open Manchu-language archives to students without prior training. 

Nora joined UCL in 2024 and directs the Centre for Central and East Asian Studies. 

She received her Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics in 2022. Before Joining UCL, she taught at LSE and Oxford.

Ph.D. Supervision

Nora supervises students working on the social and material history of China and Inner Asia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. 

Current students:

• Song Feiyang, ‘Gendered Voices under Judgment: Reconstructing Non-Elite Women’s Agency through Qing Legal Archives’.
• Ying Kecheng, ‘The Long May Fourth: Memory and Legacy in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–2000’.
• Lang Liu, ‘China’s Soft Power: International Reactions to the Belt and Road Initiative’, Department of Political Science.

She convenes the Qing Manchu Documents Reading Course for UCL research students. If you are interested, email Nora to join.

Major publications

• 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 85, no. 2 (May 2026): 338–357.
• Qiu, Yitong. ‘Dress, Power, and Identity in the Qing Empire: An Investigation of Dress Ownership Found in the Confiscation Inventories’. Central Asiatic Journal, accepted.
• Qiu, Yitong, and Catherine R. Schenk. ‘Payments Across Financial Sanctions: The Case of the Shanghai Commercial Bank in Hong Kong, 1949–65’. In Cross-border Payment Systems in Historical Perspective, edited by Catherine R. Schenk and Marianna Astore. In press.
• Hatase, Mariko, Yitong Qiu, and Catherine R. Schenk. ‘Japanese Correspondent Banking in the Twentieth Century: Strategy and Structure’. In Cross-border Payment Systems in Historical Perspective. In press.
• Qiu, Yitong. ‘Food and Dietetics’. In The Cambridge History of Medicine. In press.
• Qiu, Yitong, and Xiaoyun Tang. ‘Disciplining the State: Confiscation and Strategic Governance in Late Imperial Qing China’. Past and Present, accepted.

For a full list of publications see Nora’s personal website.

Active and recent grants/projects

• 03/2021–05/2026, European Research Council (ERC), grant agreement no. 883758, PI: Catherine R. Schenk. ‘Global Correspondent Banking 1870–2000’ (GloCoBank), University of Oxford. Nora oversees the East Asia Package.
• 09/2015–02/2021, European Research Council (ERC) grant agreement no. 637695, PI: Bas van Leeuwen, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. ‘The Historical Dynamics of Industrialization in Northwestern Europe and China, ca. 1800–2010: A Regional Interpretation’ (HInDI). Nora is a member of the research team. 

Media appearances and public engagement

• 2025–26 Frontiers and People: Encountering China from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century, digital exhibition curated by Nora with student curators.
• 2023 China’s Hidden Century, British Museum. Nora contributed to the curation of the exhibition, worked on the voice and shadow of Empress Dowager Cixi, and translated Chinese exhibition scripts into Manchu.
• 2023 Wide Open Air Exchange, 2SER 107.3FM, Sydney. Guest appearance on the history of finance and banking in East Asia.

Teaching

Undergraduate

HIST 0089 Frontiers and People: Encountering China, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century

HIST 0919 The Making of Modern East Asia, 1600–2000

HIST 0927 The Rise of a Global Superpower: The Political Economy of China (1750-2000)

HIST 0953 Law and Society in Late Imperial China

Masters 

HIST 0931 The Great Qing: China’s Last Empire, 1644–1850

HIST 0923 From Empire to Nation: The Making of Modern China, 1850–2000
 

For more information, visit Nora’s RPS profile.

Contact information

Email: yitong.qiu@ucl.ac.uk

Office: 303, 23 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: Tuesday 10:00-12:00 in person (Term 1 and 2). Book via email or Google forms. 

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments. 

Qualifications

PhD in Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science 2022

External Role:

Glocobank, Associate Faculty, Department of History, University of Oxford