Rachel Leow

Biographic Data

ID1258851
NAMERachel Leow
GIVEN NAMESRachel
FAMILY NAMELeow
SIGNATURELEOW R
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cambridge
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS11
TOTAL CITATIONS16
WORKS AS AUTHOR11
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2012
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • LionelSmith, The Law of Loyalty, Oxford

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEModern Law Review2025

  • Vernacular Imaginaries of the Southern Seas

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEThe American Historical Review2025

  • The Historian as Transnational Agent

    Open AccessYushu Geng, Rachel LeowARTICLEThe American Historical Review2024

  • Beyond diaspora’s horizons

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEInter-Asia Cultural Studies2023References: 21

    This essay argues for the need to look beyond “diaspora” paradigms of global Chinese historical experience, and that we may need different metaphors in order to do so. Examining the little-known history of the mass deportation of Chinese colonial subjects from Malaya to China during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), it reflects empirically on why cases like these necessitate more sensitive approaches to global Chinese experiences which resist the …

  • A Pyrrhic Victory for Unjust Enrichment in Singapore? Esben Finance Ltd v Wong Hou‐Lianq Neil

    Open AccessRachel Leow, Timothy LiauARTICLEModern Law Review2023

    In Esben Finance Ltd v Wong Hou‐Lianq Neil ( Esben ) the Singapore Court of Appeal handed down a momentous judgment, holding that, unlike in England and Wales, unjust enrichment claims in Singapore could not be time‐barred under the Limitation Act, laches would not apply, and ‘lack of consent’ should be accepted as an unjust factor, subject to circumscribed limits. These are novel stances, unheard of anywhere else in the common law world. We sugg…

  • The Patriarchy of Diaspora

    Rachel LeowARTICLETwentieth-Century China2022

    This paper critically appraises the earliest sociological investigations of Nanyang Chinese communities by the sociologist Chen Da (1892-1975). By exploring Chen's corpus of work and highlighting systemic blindspots of race and gender, it reveals the normative rather than empirical quality of his sociological elaboration of the huaqiao. Tracing the genesis of his research, and his travels through Southeast Asia, it shows how, at each stage, Chen’…

  • Weeping Qingdao Tears Abroad

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEItinerario2020References: 29

    This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constitue…

  • Getting By

    Rachel LeowARTICLEJournal of Chinese Overseas2017

  • Taming Babel

    Open AccessRachel LeowBOOKTaming Babel2016

    Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which Bri…

  • Age as a Category of Gender Analysis

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEThe Journal of Asian Studies2012Cited by: 6References: 33

    Gail Hershatter's presidential addressat the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can "sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location." The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous…

  • Do you own non-Chinese mui tsai?' Re-examining Race and Female Servitude in Malaya and Hong Kong, 1919-1939

    Open AccessRachel LeowARTICLEModern Asian Studies2012Cited by: 10References: 7

    This paper considers the abolition of the mui tsai (young female bondservants) as it unfolded in British Malaya, and challenges the overemphasis on Hong Kong as the primary focus of mui tsai scholarship. While the mui tsai system was defended as a time-honoured Chinese tradition, this paper uses new material to show that trans-racial considerations figured prominently in mui tsai abolition in Malaya, particularly in helping to recast it as a wide…