Alison Bashford

Alison Bashford is an Australian historian of science and medicine, and the Director of the Laureate Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her books include An Intimate History of Evolution, which explores how the biologist Julian Huxley's scientific world and personal life intertwined in the creation of modern evolutionary thinking.

Bashford has written extensively on global health, population, archaeology and the imperial science of the twentieth century. Her portrait of the Huxley circle uses letters, archives and scientific biography to show how ideas about heredity and society grew inside families as much as laboratories — a study that won her international scholarly prizes.