Yi Li is a Lecturer in East and South East Asian History at Aberystwyth University, Wales. She received her Ph.D. from SOAS, University of London in 2012. Prior to joining Aberystwyth, she worked as Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and online learning programme manager at SOAS. Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial history of the Sino-Burmese community, Chinese migration and diaspora, Anglo-Welsh colonialism in Asia, and modern East and Southeast Asian history. She was born and raised in Shanghai, and spent years living, studying and working in Singapore and Britain. Before becoming a historian, Yi was trained as a software engineer.

Yi has been a major collaborator on the Teacher's Training Toolkit (TTT), an HAB manual for alternative pedagogy for underground educators in Myanmar. As part of the TTT, Yi with fellow partners Tharaphi Than, Jyothi Thrivikraman, and Surajit Sarkar have organised multiple workshops to test and develop the toolkit's methodology, both in Leiden and in Chiang Mai.