Alison Bashford

Alison Caroline Bashford, FAHA, FBA (born 1963) is an Australian historian and academic, specialising in global history and the history of science. She has a particular interest in the modern histories of gender and colonialism. Since 2017, she has been Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge (2013–2017).

From 1996 to 2009, Bashford was a lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. She was appointed Professor of Modern History in 2009. Between 2009 and 2010, Bashford held the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. Moving to England, she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge from 2013 to 2017. Since 2017, she has been Research Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program.

Bashford has also held visiting positions at Warwick University and University College, London.

Bashford has published five books, including Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (1998), Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health (2003), Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (2014) and The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population (2016), and edited seven, including Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present (2006), the Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010), and Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2014). Her current work focuses on cosmopolitan histories of modern earth sciences.

In 2010, Bashford was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In July 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales.