Catherine Bishop is a New Zealand-born, Australian-based historian specialising in gender and business history.[1] In 2016 she won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize.[2]
Bishop grew up in the North Island town of Whanganui, where her father was a teacher at Whanganui Collegiate School and the family lived on the school grounds.[3] Bishop attended Whanganui High School and then moved to Wellington to study history and maths at Victoria University of Wellington. She completed a master's degree in history at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 2012 she completed a PhD in history at the Australian National University, studying the lives of businesswomen in Sydney and Wellington.[4]
In 2015, Bishop published some of her PhD research as the book Minding Her Own Business: Colonial businesswomen in Sydney.[5] The following year, it won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize.[6] In 2016, she was the Australian Religious History Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales. The same year she won the Australian Women's History Network Mary Bennett prize and received a New Zealand History Trust Award to help fund her research for her second book extending her PhD research, Women Mean Business: Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2019).[7] [8]
In 2019, she was a visiting fellow at Northumbria University in England. From 2019 to 2021 she has a postdoctoral fellowship at Macquarie University and is working on research into Australian businesswomen since 1880.[9]
In 2021 Bishop published Too much cabbage and Jesus Christ : Australia's 'mission girl' Annie Lock (Wakefield Press), this was an extension of her master's degree thesis, about Australian missionary Annie Lock.[10]
Bishop is also a contributor to the Dictionary of Sydney and the Australian Dictionary of Biography.[11]