Dr Frances Steel

BA, PGDip (Otago) PhD (ANU)

Location: 19.2023
Phone: 02 4221 3608
Email: fsteel@uow.edu.au

I am originally from New Zealand and crossed the Tasman to pursue postgraduate studies at the Australian National University in 2004. After a short stint teaching at the University of Otago in Dunedin, I joined the University of Wollongong at the beginning of 2009.

Research

My research interests include:

oceanic history, with a focus on the colonial Pacific
histories of mobility, transport and tourism, with an emphasis on the sea
transnational and transcolonial history
food history, particularly the cultural history of butter as an imperial and national commodity

I am currently working on two main projects:

Trans-Pacific mobility cultures in a global age
This project builds on my doctoral research, which explored the cultural history of the colonial Pacific through shipping networks and maritime labour relations in the age of steam. Here I am exploring the rise of modern trans-Pacific mobilities, focusing on the passenger trades of the large shipping companies active in the region from the late nineteenth century up to about the 1960s. I am interested in the ways in which heightened mobility practices shaped regional and global relations across this period and, more particularly, in the dynamics of the ship as a space of transnational and interpersonal encounters – between tourists, businessmen, maritime workers, and whoever else I might discover on board – who travelled between Australia, New Zealand and North America and the various island port calls in-between.

Houseboys: Transcolonial histories of domestic service in the Asia Pacific
This ARC-funded Discovery Project (2011-13) is led by Dr Julia Martinez and involves collaboration with colleagues Assoc. Prof. Victoria Haskins and Dr Claire Lowrie at Newcastle University. In this project we will consider the extent to which a culture of domestic service was developed and shared across various colonies, both within and beyond the British Empire, focusing on the experiences of male servants and their employers. I will contribute case studies of colonial service on board steamships and in Pacific port-town hotels. You can read more about this project here.

Teaching

I teach in the History Program with particular interests in the colonial history of the Pacific, the histories of Australia and New Zealand as places in the Pacific, transnational history and cultural history.

I am happy to supervise postgraduate students with interests in any of these broad regional and thematic areas, or in the interdisciplinary fields of mobility, transport and tourism history.

Publications

Searchable RIS Publications database >>

Books:
Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Studies in Imperialism series, in press – June 2011).

Book chapters:
‘Maritime mobilities in Pacific history: Towards a scholarship of betweenness,’ in Gijs Mom et al, eds, Mobility in History: Themes in Transport: T2M Yearbook 2011 (Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, 2010), 199-204.
‘Via New Zealand around the world: The Union Steam Ship Company and the trans-Pacific mail lines, 1880s-1910s,’ in Prue Ahrens and Chris Dixon, eds, Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2010), 59-76.
‘Suva under steam: Mobile men and a colonial port capital, 1880s-1910s,’ in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 110-26.

Journal articles:
‘Women, men and the Southern Octopus: Shipboard gender relations in the age of steam,’ International Journal of Maritime History Forum: Women and the Sea in the Pacific, XX, no. 2 (December 2008): 285-306.
‘A source of our wealth, yet adverse to our health? Butter and the diet-heart link in New Zealand to c. 1990,’ Social History of Medicine 18, no. 3 (December 2005): 179-94.
‘“New Zealand is Butterland”: Interpreting the historical significance of a daily spread,’ New Zealand Journal of History 39, no. 2 (October 2005): 475-93.