Born and raised in Chongqing, a megacity on the upper Yangtze River in China, Ji Li is a historian trained in three countries — China (B.A. and M.A. at Peking University), the USA (Ph.D. at the University of Michigan), and France (Chateaubriand Scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Her initial interest in Chinese and French history and Sino-European communication later developed into several projects on French missionaries in China, and her research now centers on the social and religious history of late imperial and modern China — particularly the history of Christianity, religion and local society, women and gender, and cross-cultural studies. Her transnational training and research trajectory has equipped her with the cultural fluency to recover often-neglected people from multilingual archives, and it underlies the micro-historical, ground-up method that defines her approach to studying China's local and global histories together.

She publishes in both English and Chinese and is the author of God's Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and Chinese Society from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (edited volume, Leiden: Brill, 2021), and At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), which was named to IBMR's Top Ten Books of 2023. She is a visiting scholar and research fellow at EHESS (France), Cambridge University (UK), the Ricci Institute, Boston College (USA), the Harvard-Yenching Institute (USA), and the Institute for the Transnational History of China (HK).

Her current research explores the complex intersections of religion, local society, and the development of modern China within a global context. She is currently working on two new book projects: one examining the relationship between religion and vernacular knowledge through the lens of gender and literacy, and another exploring religion's role in shaping urban China through the life cycle of an urban area in her hometown. She is also editing the manuscript collection of dialect materials gathered by French missionary Alfred Caubrière (1876–1948).