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Lowrie, Claire K. Dr

Senior Lecturer

  • Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts
  • School of Humanities and Social Inquiry

Overview

Claire Lowrie joined the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong in 2014. Claire's research concerns the history of colonialism in tropical northern Australia and Southeast Asia. She focuses specifically on the politics of everyday life in the colonies. Claire has written extensively on domestic service and the ways in which conceptions of gender, class and race shaped relationships within the colonial home. Claire also writes on histories of labour and migration. Recently she has begun new research on colonial migrant women's everyday responses to tropical climate. Her work is transcolonial and comparative in focus. Her teaching specialisations include Australian and Southeast Asian history, global and transnational history, labour history, environmental history and the history of colonialism and imperialism. She has previously worked at the University of Sydney, the University of Newcastle (Australia) and the University of Auckland.

Top Publications

Research Overview

  • Claire’s research focuses on the history of colonialism and labour in the tropical Asia-Pacific region. Her book, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics, 1880-1930, was published by Manchester University Press in 2016. The book explores the emergence of a shared colonial culture of domestic service in Singapore and Darwin. Claire shows how this shared culture was forged through the exchange of ideas, people and trade between the port cities and was marked the common preference for employing Chinese ‘houseboys’ in the homes of British and white Australian colonists.

    Claire undertook further research on the culture of ‘houseboys’ and colonialism in the tropics as part of a collaborative ARC Discovery Project based at the University of Wollongong with Julia Martinez, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins. The major outcome of this project, Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia-Pacific, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. She is a co-editor (with Haskins) of a volume on Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, New York, 2015). Claire has published her work in Modern Asian Studies, The Pacific Historical Review, Gender and History, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and History Australia.

Available as Research Supervisor

Selected Publications

Available as Research Supervisor

Potential Supervision Topics

    • Australian history (particularly the history of the tropical north)
    • Colonial histories of Southeast Asia
    • Histories of migration
    • Cultural history
    • Gender history
    • Labour history
    • the history of intercultural contact
    • Environmental history

Advisees

  • Graduate Advising Relationship

    Degree Research Title Advisee
    Doctor of Philosophy A Matter of Taste: the Australian Women’s Weekly and the birth of a modern Australian food culture, 1933-1982 Samuelsson, Lauren

Keywords

  • domestic service
    colonialism
    labour
    Chinese migration
    Southeast Asia
    northern Australia

Top Publications

Research Overview

  • Claire’s research focuses on the history of colonialism and labour in the tropical Asia-Pacific region. Her book, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics, 1880-1930, was published by Manchester University Press in 2016. The book explores the emergence of a shared colonial culture of domestic service in Singapore and Darwin. Claire shows how this shared culture was forged through the exchange of ideas, people and trade between the port cities and was marked the common preference for employing Chinese ‘houseboys’ in the homes of British and white Australian colonists.

    Claire undertook further research on the culture of ‘houseboys’ and colonialism in the tropics as part of a collaborative ARC Discovery Project based at the University of Wollongong with Julia Martinez, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins. The major outcome of this project, Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia-Pacific, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. She is a co-editor (with Haskins) of a volume on Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, New York, 2015). Claire has published her work in Modern Asian Studies, The Pacific Historical Review, Gender and History, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and History Australia.

Selected Publications

Potential Supervision Topics

    • Australian history (particularly the history of the tropical north)
    • Colonial histories of Southeast Asia
    • Histories of migration
    • Cultural history
    • Gender history
    • Labour history
    • the history of intercultural contact
    • Environmental history

Advisees

  • Graduate Advising Relationship

    Degree Research Title Advisee
    Doctor of Philosophy A Matter of Taste: the Australian Women’s Weekly and the birth of a modern Australian food culture, 1933-1982 Samuelsson, Lauren

Keywords

  • domestic service
    colonialism
    labour
    Chinese migration
    Southeast Asia
    northern Australia
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Research Areas

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