Rate My Professor Frances Steel

Steel's research centres on the history of the Pacific world, with particular emphasis on colonial networks, oceanic mobilities, transnational labour cultures, maritime history, labour history, and commodity histories including food and consumption cultures. Her current projects include a book on British and American imperialisms in the Pacific via transpacific steamship and aviation routes, and an examination of refrigeration's role in colonial food trades across the Pacific. Key publications encompass her monograph Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.1870–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2011), co-authored Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and edited New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives (Bridget Williams Books, 2018). Notable recent articles are 'Beyond the Urban Kitchen: Refrigeration and Domesticity across Australia and the Pacific Islands, 1920s-1940s' (Journal of Social History, 2025) and 'Waitresses at Sea: Gender, Race and Service Labour on Ocean Liners, c.1930s-1960s' (Women’s History Review, 2021). She has secured research grants from the Australian Research Council and the National Library of Australia. Awards include the 2019 Marian Quartly Prize for an article in History Australia and runner-up for the Non-Fiction Prize in the 2019 New Zealand Heritage Book Awards for New Zealand and the Sea. Steel contributes to editorial boards of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Journal of Pacific History, and The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History.