RESEARCH PROFILE

Clare is currently engaged on two related projects. The first is Marginal Centres: subaltern biographies of the Indian Ocean world. The project aims to interrogate non-elite understandings and enactments of boundaries of race, class, and gender during the early nineteenth century in a range of colonial settings: from Mauritius and the Seychelles to India, Burma, the Straits Settlements, the Andaman Islands, and Australia.

Clare has also recently started the interdisciplinary and collaborative project Integrated Histories of the Andaman Islands.

With respect to both these research projects, she is developing work on subaltern life-history writing, global histories of penal transportation and the interface between 'academic' and 'family' history.

BACKGROUND

Clare Anderson was an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MA (honours) in History-Sociology in 1993. She participated in the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme in rural Ishikawa, and returned to Edinburgh to study for a doctorate in 1994. She wrote her thesis on the Indian penal settlement in nineteenth-century Mauritius. She completed her PhD in 1997, and joined the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester that year. She took up her post at Warwick in October 2007.

Clare has developed a range of research interests that centre on South Asia and the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from prisons, penal colonies, and plantations, to the history of anthropology, vagrancy, policing, photography, leprosy, voyaging, and the colonial body. These interests are reflected in her teaching, which aims to get students thinking historically in their sociological work.

Clare held an ESRC Research Fellowship between 2002-6, working on nineteenth-century British penal settlements in the Indian Ocean. Subsequently, she was awarded the 1-year Caird Senior Research Fellowship and 2-year Sackler-Caird Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum to examine subaltern experiences of Indian Ocean journeys and the possibilities of subaltern biography. She is a member of the British Association of South Asian Studies and the Social History Society, and serves on the editorial advisory boards for the journals Cultural and Social History and Journal for Maritime Research. She is currently on the executive committee of the British Association for South Asian Studies and a member of the AHRC peer review college.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

• RDF DA25 09/10: Social Sciences Faculty Forum Funding, Research Development Fund, Project Start Date: 17/11/2009 Project End Date: 31/07/2010
• Integrated Histories of the Andaman Islands, ESRC, Project Start Date: 01/10/2009 Project End Date: 30/09/2012
  
  

  Further Research Projects

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Anderson C (2010) 'The Transportation of Narain Singh: Punishment, Honour and Identity from the Anglo-Sikh Wars to the Great Revolt' Modern Asian Studies 44 (5), (0026-749X)
• Anderson C (2009) 'Gender, identity, mobility: an introduction to the annual conference edition of the British Association for South Asian Studies' Contemporary South Asia 17 (1), 3 - 6 (0958-4935) [article]
• Anderson C (2009) 'Convicts and coolies: rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century' Slavery & Abolition 30 (1), 93 - 109 (0144-039X) [article]
• Anderson C (2009) 'Image, object, text: representing the Andaman Islands' History Workshop Journal 67 (1), 147 - 151 (1363-3554) [article]
• Anderson C (2009) 'Oscar Mallitte's Andaman Photographs (1857-8)' History Workshop Journal 67 (1), 152 - 172 (1363-3554) [article]

Further Publications

RECENT RESEARCH DEGREES SUPERVISED

• Business and benevolence: the East India Company and its warehouse labouring staff, 1800-1858 Date of Completion: 2007
• Honour Crime
• Lascar mutinies in the Indian Ocean and beyond, 1780-1860
• Missionaries, Memories and Museums: English encounters with Indigenous British Columbia at home and abroad, 1920-1940