Claire began her studies as a history undergraduate in Ontario, Canada at McMaster University, completing an MA in History at the University of Toronto, followed by a B.Ed. at UofT OISE and some time spent teaching high school history and politics in the remote reaches of Northern Ontario. She then emigrated to Cambridge, UK, where she worked as an archives assistant at the Churchill Archives Centre, and learned a great many amusing anecdotes about the wartime British Prime Minister. Her store of humourous quips and witty quotations well-stocked, she then undertook an MPhil in Russian Studies, followed by a PhD in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Bristol in 2018, Claire taught at the University of Cambridge and King's College London (History Dept.), and held the Max Hayward Visiting Fellowship at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. 

Claire's monograph, Stalin’s Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Postwar Soviet Reality 1945-53, will be published by Cornell University Press in June 2024. Her recent publications centre on late Stalin-era film censorship and trophy films captured by the Red Army and Sovietized for screening across the USSR during the early Cold War, and can be found in SEER, Kritika and KinoKultura. She also has an interest in the use of film in as a tool of diplomacy during the Anglo-Soviet Alliance, 1941-45, and began research for this project as an Archives Byfellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2022.

In 2023, Claire stepped away from Russian studies in order to serve as the inaugural Academic Director for the university's Centre for Study Abroad, a post she will hold until 2026.