Alison Bashford

Who is Alison Bashford?

Alison Bashford is a noted scholar of the global history of science, with particular interest in the modern histories of gender and colonialism.

As of early 2014, she is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, and between 2009 and 2010 held the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. Previously, Bashford had positions at Warwick University and University College, London. In 2010, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

She has published four books, including Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment, and Victorian Medicine, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health and Life on Earth: Geopolitics and the World Population Problem, and edited five, including Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present and the Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics.

From October 2013, she will succeed Sir Christopher Bayly as the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. Her current work focuses on Malthus and Malthusianism in their international contexts.