I am a historian of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular interest in the development of the modern Chinese economy, the history of finance and electricity in China, and modern China’s connections to the world. My research spans economic and business history, the history of technology and the global history of capitalism.

I am an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. Before, I was a JSPS International Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo.

My first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. In 2023, the book was a finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History. My new research project deals with the history of the electrical and electronics industries in China from the 19th century to the present.

Together with my colleague Dr. John Wong, I run the Chinese Business History Webinar at the HKIHSS, which hosts regular talks by scholars working on different aspects of the historical development of business and entrepreneurship in modern China. We also organise a regular lecture series as part of the Delta on the Move research project at the HKIHSS. Finally, I currently also organise the HKIHSS interdisciplinary lunchtime seminar series. The series features talks by early career scholars mostly from Hong Kong. Recordings of many of these talks can be found on the HKIHSS YouTube page. I also serve as a member of the Emerging Scholars Committee of the Business History Conference.

I was trained at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where I received a BA in Chinese Studies in 2012 and a PhD in Modern Chinese History in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Hans van de Ven. During my graduate studies, I was a visiting scholar at the Department of History, East China Normal University, Shanghai and at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taibei.

For my PhD, I was examined by Prof. Debin Ma of the University of Oxford and Prof. Micah Muscolino of the University of California, San Diego. My doctoral dissertation won the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize of the Business History Conference. It was also nominated as a finalist for the Dissertation Prize (Category: The Long 19th Century) of the World Economic History Congress 2018.