Alison Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge (2013–2017).

[1] Between 2009 and 2010, Bashford held the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University.

[5] Bashford has published six books, including An Intimate History of Evolution: The Huxleys in Nature and Culture (Allen Lane, 2022) 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 has 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.

[10] She won the 2023 Nib Literary Award[11] and was shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize for The Huxleys.