Historian and writer, Alison Bashford is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population and founding co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program.
Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of Humanities and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.
Research and Writing
Alison Bashford’s books combine the history of science and medicine, the history of ideas, and global history, across scales both grand and intimate. How did our strange, wondrous, and dangerous twenty-first century come to be? She has received awards for groundbreaking histories of eugenics, of infectious disease control and quarantine, and of population debates in the recent and distant past. More recently, she has researched global histories of earth sciences.
Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic emerges from an enduring captivation with the borderlands between science and mythology, science and religions, and the natural magic within the history of science and medicine itself.
Awards
In 2021, Bashford was awarded the Dan David Prize for her longstanding scholarship in the history of medicine. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Society (NSW) History and Philosophy of Science Medal for transformative historical studies of the biomedical and environmental sciences.
An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Allen Lane, UK; University of Chicago Press, US) was a New Yorker and Economist, best book of the year, winner of the Nib Literary Award (2023), the Alex Buzo Prize (2023), and shortlisted for the Cundill Prize (2023).
Latest book
Decoding the Hand
A History of Science, Medicine and Magic
The astonishing history of palmistry and biometrics—from occult physicians to the very foundations of modern science and medicine.