Qiong Wu

Ph.D. Student

advisor: Dr. Fabricio Prado
email: [[qwu11]]
Current Research: Vast Early America, the Early U.S.-China Trade, Comparative and Transnational

Bio

Qiong is a Ph.D. candidate in History at William & Mary specializing in early American history and the U.S.-China trade. She holds Master’s degrees in American Studies from Brown University and Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her research investigates U.S. mercantile engagement with the Qing Empire’s Thirteen Factories from the 1750s through the 1840s, focusing on how the early America-China trade fostered a transculturation of economic ideas, cultural artifacts, and social practices. Her work has received support from the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.

Alongside her research, Qiong served as a Digital Apprentice at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture from 2023 to 2024. She is also a dedicated instructor whose teaching experience includes leading classes for the Keio University/William & Mary Cross-Cultural Collaboration and teaching HIST 219: the American Independence for the National Institute of American History & Democracy (NIAHD) Pre-College Program. In Fall 2026, she is teaching an undergraduate course at William & Mary titled "Early America in Commodities," which employs commodity history methodology to examine how these commodities connected early America to wider worlds, and how those worlds, in turn, shaped early America.