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Home > Faculty of Arts > School of History & Po... > Staff and Contact Details > Frances Steel

Dr Frances Steel

BA, PGDip (Otago) PhD (ANU)

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

Biography

Frances joined the University of Wollongong in 2009. Prior to that she taught at the University of Otago (2008).

Her research interests include:

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

Current Research

Frances’ current research centres on the role and significance of shipping and the sea in histories of colonialism. She is working on two inter-connected projects. The first examines the routes and routines of maritime traffic in the western Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a particular focus on the operations of the largest shipping company in the southern hemisphere, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand. It explores the nature of imperial, transnational and cross-cultural relations across the expanse of the sea and the confines of the ship. The second project charts the colonial origins of cruise-ship tourism in the Pacific, bringing together the operations of British, Australian, New Zealand and American companies between the 1880s and 1950s.

In both projects Frances is interested in exploring the ways in which histories framed around the sea can offer new perspectives on mobility in colonial history and the significance of regional relations and interconnections in the modern Pacific world

Teaching

Frances teaches 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.

Publications

Searchable RIS Publications database >>

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.

Book chapters

• ‘Via New Zealand Around the World: The Union Steam Ship Company and the Trans-Pacific Mail Lines, 1880s-1910s,’ in Prue Ahrens, ed., Coast to Coast and the Islands In-Between: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern Pacific Networks, 1880 to 1945 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Press Pacific Focus Series, in press).
•  ‘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.

Organisational Affiliations

Member of the Australian Historical Association

Member of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies