Professor Alison Bashford

PhD BA (Hons) (Sydney)
Room 848 Brennan Building

+61 2 9351 3884

Contact August 2009 until June 2010
Mail: Professor Alison Bashford
Chair of Australian Studies
Department of the History of Science
Harvard University
Science Center, 1 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Email:

Professor Bashford has published widely in the cultural history of medicine and public health. Her books have focused on both British and Australian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Bashford's most recent work analyses the problem of world overpopulation in the 1920s and 30s. She has also researched the history of nationalism and imperialism through the history of disease management, medicine and science. She is an Honorary Associate of the Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, teaches in the graduate program in Medical Humanities, and was founding Co-Chair with Professor Robert Aldrich of the 'Nation-Empire-Globe' Research Cluster. Professor Bashford has been a Visiting Fellow at Edinburgh University, Warwick University, and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University College London. In 2009/10 Professor Bashford is Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University, based in the History of Science Department.

Professor Bashford is currently completing a book on geopolitics and the world population problem (Columbia University Press) and is researching “Immigration Restriction and the Racial State over the Long Twentieth Century” with Dr Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck) and Dr Jane McAdam (University of New South Wales).

In March 2010, Alison Bashford convenes two conferences at Harvard University. “Climate: science + humanities” for graduate students from China, Australia, and Harvard; and “Changing Climate: historians and hemispheres in conversation” which gather 15 of the world’s leading historians of medicine, science and environmental determinism.
http://harvaus.fas.harvard.edu

Research areas

• Modern medical history
• The history of gender
• The history of science

Current Projects

• World Health: the intellectual history of a twentieth century idea
• The genealogy of 'world population'
• The comparative history of eugenics

Selected Publications

Books

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford University Press: New York, forthcoming, June 2010). Co-edited with Philippa Levine.

Griffith Taylor: Visionary, Environmentalist, Explorer
(University of Toronto Press and 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).

Book Chapters

“The Great White Plague Turns Alien: Tuberculosis in Australia, 1901-2001” in Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys (eds), Tuberculosis Then and Now (McGill Queens University Press, 2010).

“Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Eugenics” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

“Where Did Eugenics Go?” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

'Australasia and Oceania' in Harold Cook, Anne Hardy and Sanjoy Bhattacharya (eds.), History and the Social Determinants of Health (Orient Longman: New Delhi, 2008), pp. 9-26.

'The Age of Universal Contagion: history, disease and globalization' in A. Bashford (ed.), Medicine at the Border (London and New York: Palgrave, 2006).

'Where is the border? Tuberculosis screening in Australia and the UK, 1950-2000' in A. Bashford (ed.), Medicine at the Border (London and New York: Palgrave, 2006). Co-authored with Ian Convery and John Welshman.

'Gender, Medicine and Empire’ in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 6. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) pp. 113-33

'Isolation and Exclusion in the Modern World’ in Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, eds, Isolation: places and practices of exclusion (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) pp. 1-19. Co-authored with C. Strange.

‘Cultures of Confinement: tuberculosis, isolation and the sanatorium’ in Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, eds, Isolation: places and practices of exclusion (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) pp. 133-49

‘Foreign Bodies: vaccination, contagion and colonialism in the nineteenth century’ in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, eds, Contagion: historical and cultural studies (London and New York, Routledge, 2001) pp. 39-60

‘Leprosy and the Management of Race, Sexuality and Nation’ in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, eds, Contagion: historical and cultural studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) pp. 106-28. Co-authored with Maria Nugent.

'Contagion, Modernity and Postmodernity' in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, eds, Contagion: historical and cultural studies (London and New York: Routledge), 2001, pp. 1-12. Co-authored with Claire Hooker.

'Separatist Health: Meanings of Women's Hospitals, c. 1870-1930' in Lilian R. Furst (ed.), Climbing a Long Hill: Women Healers and Physicians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky) 1997, pp. 198-220.

Articles

'Population, Geopolitics and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century,' Journal of World History 19 (2008): 327-347.

'World Population, World Health and Security: 20th century trends,' Journal of Epidemiology and Population Health 62 (2008): 187-90.

'Thinking Historically about Public Health', Medical Humanities, 33 (2007): 87-92. Co-authored with Carolyn Strange.

'World Population and Australian Land: demography and sovereignty in the twentieth century,' Australian Historical Studies, 38, 130, October (2007): 211-27

‘Nation, Empire, Globe: the spaces of population debate in the interwar years’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 1 (2007): 1-32

'Tuberculosis, migration, and medical examination: lessons from history', Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60 (2006): 282-84. Co-authored with John Welshman.

'Global biopolitics and the history of world health', History of the Human Sciences, 18, 1 (2006): 67-88

'Immigration and Health: Law and regulation in Australia, 1958-2004', Health and History, 7, 1 (2005): 86-101

'Immigration and Health: law and regulation in Australia, 1901-1958', Health and History, vol. 6, no. 1 (2004): 97-112. Co-authored with Sarah Howard.

'Public Pedagogy: sex education and mass communication in the mid twentieth century', Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 13, no. 1 (2004): 71-99. Co-authored with Carolyn Strange.

‘At the Border: contagion, immigration, nation’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 120 (2002): 344-58

'Tuberculosis and Economy: Public Health and Labour in the Early Welfare State', Health and History, vol. 4, no. 2 (2002): 19-40

‘Asylum-seekers and national histories of detention’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 48, no. 4 (2002): 509-27. Co-authored with Carolyn Strange.

‘Diphtheria and Australian Public Health: Bacteriology and its Complex Applications, 1890-1930’, Medical History, 46 (2002): 41-64. Co-authored with Claire Hooker.

‘Domestic Scientists: The Negotiation of Science and Gender in Early Twentieth Century Australia’, Journal of Women’s History, 12, 2 (2000): 127-146

‘'Is White Australia Possible?' colonialism, race and tropical medicine', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23 (2000): 112-135

‘Epidemic and Governmentality: Smallpox in Sydney, 1881’, Critical Public Health, 12 (1999): 301-16

‘Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation’, Health, 2 (1998): 387-402

‘The Return of the Repressed: Feminism in the Quad’, Australian Feminist Studies, 13 (1998): 47-54

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching at Harvard University

• Contagion and Colonialism, the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Spring term 2010.
• The Comparative History of Eugenics, the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Fall term 2009.

Teaching at the University of Sydney

• Imperial History/World History - History Honours Seminar
• HSTY3099 Public and Private Life in Britain, 1707-1901
• HSTY2061 Medicine, Gender and History
• HSTY6988 Contagion: history and culture

Supervision

Professor Bashford currently supervises doctoral candidates with interest and expertise in medical history; history of gender and sexuality; history of geography.

Meg Parsons, “Spaces of Disease: the creation and management of Aboriginal health and disease in Queensland 1900-1970” (PhD, 2008)

Émile Paquin, “Social Hygiene in NSW, Ontario and Quebec: a comparative history of two organizations” (MPhil, 2008)

Gregory Ussher, “The Medical Gaze and the Watchful Eye: The Treatment, Prevention and Epidemiology of Venereal Disease in New South Wales, 1901-1925” (PhD, 2007)

Jennifer Germon, “Generations of Gender: past, present, potential” (PhD, 2006)

Rose Ellis, “For We are Young and Free: A critical study of Bee Miles” (PhD, 2005)

Kirsty McKenzie, “Becoming Autonomous: Orgasm, Autonomy, and Female Subjectivity” (PhD, 2002)

Suzanne Fraser, “On the Surface: Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture in Australia” (PhD, 1999)

Conference Activity

Selected Invited Talks

'Population, Food, and Health: global problems in the twentieth century'
German Historical Institute, Washington DC, 10 June 2010

'Hungry People and Empty Lands: Australia, Geopolitics, and the World Population Problem, c.1918-1954'
University of Texas at Austin British Studies Seminar Series, 9 April 2010.

'Cosmopolitanism and International Eugenics'
Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, 4 Feb 2010

Keynote Address, Australia and New Zealand Studies Association of North America Conference, Washington DC, 26 February 2010

'Energy and Population: global policy in the mid twentieth century'
Expertise for the Future: Histories of Predicting Environmental Change
Harvard University and King’s College Cambridge, Center for History and Economics, Harvard University Center for the Environment, 16-17 November, 2009

'Food, Soil, People: Geopolitics and the World Population Problem'
International History Seminar Series, Harvard University, 4 November 2009

'Waste and Population'
University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study, May 2009.

'Australasia and Oceania'
History and the Social Determinants of Health Conference,
Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London, September 2006.

'Race, Australian history and infectious disease control'
Infectious Diseases and Human Flows in Asia: Historical and Contemporary Dimensions'
Centre of Asian Studies and School of Public Health
University of Hong Kong
9-10 June 2005

'Global Biopolitics'
Centre for HIV Social Research
University of NSW
28 April 2005

'The History of World Health'
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians
Sydney 18 April 2005

'Tuberculosis, Migration and Health Screening: What Can We Learn from History?
With Dr John Welshman, Lancaster and Dr Richard Coker, LSHTM
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
26 January 2005

'International Biopolitics'
History of Science and Tecnology Program
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
September 2004

‘Public Health and History: making the present strange’
Public Health Association of Australia Annual Conference
Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 October 2003

‘Medicine, Gender and Empire’
The Oxford History of the British Empire Workshop
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, October 2002

Other Professional Contributions

A/Professor Bashford has convened a series of major conferences. Most recently, 'Medicine at the Border: the history, culture and politics of global health', University of Sydney, July 2004. An edited collection of this title was published in 2006.

Previous conferences include: Isolation: places and practices of exclusion' at the University of Toronto, 2001 (with Professor Carolyn Strange); 'Contagion' at the University of Sydney, 1999 (with Dr Claire Hooker); 'The Return of the Repressed: feminism in the quad', The University of Sydney, 1996 (with A/Professor Glenda Sluga)