Rate My Professor Claire Lowrie

Claire Lowrie is an Associate Professor of History in the Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wollongong, where she has been since 2014. She previously held academic positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Auckland. Lowrie earned her PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2009, with a doctoral thesis titled 'In Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Colonial Mastery in Singapore and Darwin, 1890s-1930s'. Her research specializations encompass the history of colonialism, labour, migration, race, gender, and class, with a focus on domestic service in colonial northern Australia and Southeast Asia. She explores global and transnational histories of imperialism, environmental history, and related themes through rigorous archival work.

Lowrie's scholarly contributions include the monograph Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester University Press, 2016), which analyzes domestic service and colonial power dynamics in tropical settings. She co-edited Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2019) with Julia Martínez, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins, stemming from an Australian Research Council Discovery Project. Another co-edited volume, Colonization and Domestic Service (Routledge, 2015), addresses historical and contemporary perspectives. Her peer-reviewed articles appear in leading journals such as Gender & History ('Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’', 2009), Pacific Historical Review ('Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism', 2012), International Review of Social History ('Murder and the Working Lives of Chinese Male Servants in Colonial Singapore, 1910s–1930s', 2022), and Labor History ('‘Shameful Forms of Oppression’', 2020). Lowrie received the History Council of New South Wales Award in 2022 for a collaborative multicultural history project. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association, overseeing prizes and awards, and contributes to centres like the Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies.