Professor Claire Annesley is the founding Dean of UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA), a diverse Faculty with over 60 disciplines spanning media, education, construction, textiles, social work, languages, music – and much more. She leads UNSW ADA towards its ADA2051 vision that ‘through creativity, collaboration and inclusion we seek and solve problems to improve life on earth’. A problem-solving ethos infuses UNSW ADA from the Innovation Hub, our six Schools, multiple research Centres and Institutes and across research, education, societal impact and operations.

Claire’s goal as Dean is to design and enable environments for students, staff and partners that are challenging, inclusive and fun. Her impactful leadership is informed by politics and gender scholarship which is all about understanding, but not always accepting, how the official and unwritten rules that govern institutions open opportunities for some, but close them down for others. You can hear Claire talking about her approach to Making Positive Change in this short documentary.

Claire’s own research takes a feminist institutionalist approach to explain why women have been historically excluded from political office and what difference women’s presence makes on practice and policy. For example, her book Cabinet, Ministers and Gender with co-authors Karen Beckwith (Case Western Reserve) and Susan Franceschet (Calgary) (2019, Oxford University Press), excavates the formal and informal rules that determine why historically women have been underrepresented in cabinet across seven democracies and why this is now changing.

Claire has received multiple awards for her research and teaching, including the 2011 Richard Rose Prize from the Political Studies Association, the 2011 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize from Iowa State University, the 2012 Public Policy Section Prize from the American Political Science Association and the 2016 Johan Skytte manuscript award from Uppsala University. Claire was awarded the University of Sussex’s 'Outstanding and Innovative Undergraduate Teaching Prize’ in 2016 and 2017, as nominated by students. In 2021 she was conferred the award of Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK).

Claire is a social scientist and linguist by background. She has a BA (Hons) in German and Politics from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) with a year at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany) and a PhD in Humanities from the University of Sheffield (UK) for a thesis entitled ‘Models of Capitalism, Complexity and Postindustrialism: The case of unified Germany’. More recently, Claire has completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation and Design Thinking with MIT / Columbia / Tuck (USA) and professional development with MIT (USA), Oxford (UK) and IMD (Switzerland).

Before moving to Australia with her family in January 2020, Claire spent five years at the University of Sussex (UK) where she was Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor, Equalities and Diversity and Head of Politics. Prior to that she spent 15 years at the University of Manchester (UK). She has worked for universities, governments and think tanks in Germany, Poland and Belgium and the UK.

Claire loves living, working and raising her family in Sydney. If she’s not on the Kensington or Paddington campus, you’ll find her drinking coffee, walking her dog, or swimming in the ocean.