Dr. Claire Higgins is an historian and Senior Research Fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Law. Claire is also an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration. She holds a doctorate in History from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Clarendon Scholar, and is the author of Asylum by Boat: Origins of Australia’s refugee policy (NewSouth, 2017). 

Claire holds a Australian Research Council DECRA to research the history of protected entry procedures for refugees. She is also a co-CI on an Australian Research Council Linkage grant to research skilled employment for refugees in regional Australia. In 2018 Claire was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at Georgetown University undertaking comparative research on the history of the U.S. refugee admissions program.