Professor Victoria Haskins – Project Lead
University of Newcastle, Australia. Co-Director, Purai Indigenous Global History Centre
Victoria K Haskins is a Professor of History who works on cross-cultural histories of gender, labour, and colonization, and is internationally respected for her work on Indigenous women’s domestic labour in Australia and the United States. Her recent books include Living with the Locals: Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life (NLA, 2019), with John Maynard; Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel; Colonization and Domestic Service (Routledge 2014), with Claire Lowrie; and Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson 1014-1934 (Arizona University Press, 2012). She is the editor of the new Bloomsbury history series, Empire’s Other Histories. More Information
Professor Swapna Banerjee – Project Researcher
Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA
Located at the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in colonial South Asia, Banerjee’s research straddles related but distinct fields—on women, caregivers, children, fathers, masculinity, domesticity, and family. Her book Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (OUP, 2004) employs the lens of employer-servant relationships to understand the construction of national identity in colonial Bengal. Her second monograph, Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India (OUP, forthcoming 2020) interrogates the strong connection between fatherhood and masculinity. More Information
Dr Claire Lowrie – Project Researcher
University of Wollongong, Australia
Claire Lowrie works on the history of domestic labour and colonialism in Southeast Asia and northern Australia. She has written extensively on the experiences of Chinese domestic servants, both men and women. Claire’s work has been published in Modern Asian Studies, ILWCH, Pacific Historical Review, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and Gender and History. Her most recent book is Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia-Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2019) co-authored with Julia Martinez, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins.
Srishti Guha – Research Assistant
University of Newcastle, Australia
Srishti Guha is a PhD Candidate in History at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her thesis is titled, The Masking and Unmasking of British Colonial Advertisements: A Comparative Study of the Discourse of Advertisements in the Indian Colonial and Australian Settler Societies, 1860 – 1950, where she is undertaking a trans-colonial study of visual culture and iconography in India and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Srishti holds MA and BA degrees in History, and a PG Certificate in Editing and Publishing from Jadavpur University, India.
Jean-Michel Mutore – Research Assistant
Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA
Jean-Michel Mutore is a writer and undergraduate student at Brooklyn College, majoring in History and minoring in English. He has worked for entertainment websites Birth.Movies.Death. and Polygon as a freelance journalist and film critic. In the Fall of 2020, he researched slave families and slave marriages with Professor Swapna Banerjee for Brooklyn College’s Mellon Undergraduate Transfer Student Program. He hopes to graduate in the Fall of 2021.
Ayahs and Amahs 