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 an LLB in Laws (2015) and MSc in Empires, Colonialism, and Globalisation (2018) from the LSE. In the summer of 2022, she most recently undertook fieldwork at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri as ARB Spring Scholar 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 race, science, gender, and empire in late imperial China, stretching broadly into the early Republican period. Her research explores the ways in which ‘Western’ medical knowledge paradigms shaped and altered relationships with the body, the body’s legibility, and racial and gender narratives. 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 is currently a member of the Women's History Network (WHN) Steering Committee and has served as Convenor of the Women's History Network's Seminar Series since June 2021. 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 traveling 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.