About Professor Alison Bashford
Alison Bashford is an historian of modern science and medicine. Her early books focused on British imperial and Australian histories, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more recently she has researched connections between medical history, world history, and environmental history. In 2009 and 2010, Professor Bashford was Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, where she taught in the History of Science Department. She has held fellowships at Edinburgh University, Warwick University, and University College, London. In 2011 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to undertake research on “Climate Change and the History of Environmental Determinism.” Alison Bashford elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2010. In addition to her work within the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Alison Bashford was founding convenor of the Medical Humanities Program, founding Co-Director of the Nation Empire Globe research group, and Dean of Graduate Studies (Acting) in 2008-09.
Associate Professor Bashford's current research includes the history of immigration law and the history of eugenics. Her forthcoming book is “Geopolitics and the World Population Problem: life and earth in the global twentieth century”. This book is contracted by Columbia University Press. She is co-editing with Stuart Macintyre a 2 volume Cambridge History of Australia.
Selected publications
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford University Press: New York, 2010). Co-edited with Philippa Levine.
Griffith Taylor: Visionary, Environmentalist, Explorer (National Library of Australia Press: Canberra, 2008). Co-authored with Carolyn Strange.
Medicine at the Border: Disease, globalization and security, 1850 to the present (London and New York: Palgrave, 2006). Editor
Imperial Hygiene: a critical history of colonialism, nationalism and public health (London and New York: Palgrave, 2004).
Isolation: places and practices of exclusion (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Co-edited with C. Strange.
Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (London and New York, Routledge, 2001). Co-edited with Claire Hooker.
Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (London and New York: Macmillan, 1998).