Laureate Centre for History and Population, Morven Brown, lv.3, Room 353, 11 & 12 Dec 2025
This two-day academic workshop invites early career researchers to critically and creatively examine the concept of opposition from a historical perspective, with a focus on its political, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions. As authoritarian tendencies intensify across global contexts, the category of oppositionโits meanings, mediations, and mobilisationsโdemands urgent reassessment. From the suppression of dissent to the strategic invocation of โthe peopleโ as a homogenous body, contemporary regimes increasingly rely on discourses of division, co-optation, and corporatist unity to manage populations and forestall genuine contestation. Crucially, rising authoritarianism is bound up with the history and politics of populationโfrom immigration and labour policy to land, energy, and food governance, as well as anti-trans legislation and the broader biopolitics of sex, gender, and sexuality. These state strategies not only regulate bodies and social life but also delimit the conditions under which opposition can be conceived, organised, or enacted. This event will consider how opposition has been defined, resisted, framed, and refigured in diverse historical conjunctures, and will ask what remains possible under the sign of resistance.
Laureate Centre for History and Population, 22 & 23 Oct 2025 (Part 1) – 11 Nov 2025 (Part 2)
Wilderness and waste, desert and empty space. Across the modern world, empires and nation-states have mobilised the idea of โwastelandsโ to claim territory, manage populations, and fuel economic growth: from the Qing empire to nineteenth century Australasia, from Hokkaido to the Russian steppe, from Progressive Era America to postwar Taiwan. What explains the global resonance of this idea? And how did its meaning transform across the 19th and 20th centuries โ from underused land awaiting improvement to overused land destroyed by it?
This workshop brings together scholars of East Asia and the Anglo-world to work towards a history of modern wastelands. What does waste signify when attached to land? How does bringing East Asia and the Anglo-world into dialogue advance our understanding of global wastelands? What does the history of apparently empty spaces reveal about the modern territorial state? Where are wastelands in histories of global capitalism? And what about humans: the people who are pushed off, replaced, and confined to marginal spaces?
Drawing together intellectual history, imperial history, and environmental history, this workshop explores the possibilities that emerge when we place wastelands at the centre of modern world history.
Laureate Centre for History and Population, 26 Sep 2025
Histories of pastoralism and histories of populations represent two central streams within the historiography of Australia, New Zealand Aotearoa, and the British Empire more broadly. Both livestock (living and as commodified bodily products) and humans criss-crossed the globe, driving colonial expansion, and remaking landscapes, economies, and diets. Later historiography has largely separated out the ways that nineteenth century thinkers on political economy and colonisation frequently thought about livestock and populations together, in terms of food, reproduction and occupation of land.
This small gathering of scholars with backgrounds in animal history, cultural history, environmental history, business history and settler colonial history will reunite these strands to explore what it means to include sheep and cattle in the histories of populations on the Australian continent up to the granting of responsible government to all the colonies (apart from Western Australia) in the mid to late 1850s.
Laureate Centre for History and Population, 12 Aug – 15 Sep 2024
The Laureate Centre for History and Population is hosting four stellar scholars of reproductive politics in Asia. As part of these visits, we are organizing a series of talks and workshops in which we will discuss population in the Asian imagination. By examining topics like fertility control, family size, contraceptives and their popular imprints, we see how they were interpreted according to specific regional dynamics. Each of the Asian states planned their demographic interventions on assumedly universal categories and terms but with very different outcomes. Through the series, we understand how geography informs population dynamics and historical state transformations.
The Laureate Centre for History & Population is delighted to welcome three new postdoctoral fellows. They will be joining us from July 2024.
Matthew Birchall
Matthew Birchall specialises in British imperial history, with a particular focus on chartered companies in colonial Australia and New Zealand. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2021. His dissertation, โCompany Colonisation and the Settler Revolution, 1820-1840,โ argues that joint-stock companies, rather than the imperial state, were at the vanguard of emigration and colonisation in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Drawing on a wide range of material in archives scattered across the world โ published writings, parliamentary testimony, company minute books, personal correspondence, and Colonial Office memoranda โ this thesis shows how the company men at the centre of these enterprises imagined, and briefly realised, a corporate empire that stretched across the oceans. Matthewโs thesis was highly commended by the judges of the Australian Historical Societyโs Serle Award. He is reworking the dissertation into a scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled Corporate Conquest: How Companies Built Britainโs Settler Empire, 1815-1850.
At UNSW, Matthew will work on a population-based study of colonial South Australia, Western Australia, and New Zealand. These colonies were established on the economic and social theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an influential English political economist and colonial promoter. He will also lead a project exploring the place of population in the history of global capitalism.
Leo Chu
Leo Chu is currently finishing his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His thesis, โHarvesting Diversity: Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Transformation of the Green Revolution, 1950-2000,โ examines how agronomists, anthropologists, and ecologists shaped agricultural research in the region and how the Cold War developmentalism influenced contemporary discourses of sustainability.
At the Laureate Centre, he will expand the project by analyzing the significance of rural population and family planning in Taiwanโs postwar economic development, and how scientists and officials used Taiwanโs population policies to craft multiple contested ideas of territory and national identity amid shifting geopolitical contexts.
Hazal Ozdemir
Hazal Ozdemir is completing her PhD in the History Department of Northwestern University. Her work primarily focuses on migration, displacement, and belonging in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East. Her dissertation reconstructs late Ottoman policies of denaturalization and shows how surveillance methods devised to control the mobility of a population, including a photographic archive, were a crucial part of a broad repertoire of state violence aimed at Armenian transatlantic migrants. Her second project shifts the focus to the mobility of Armenian women in the aftermath of WWI after nearly two decades of total war and the eradication of Ottoman social welfare sites in the early Turkish Republic. This work considers how Armenian women drew on networks between cities and their hinterlands, developing circular and short-term labor migration as a strategy for economic survival after the de-population of the Armenian community. Before coming to Northwestern, Ozdemir graduated from Boฤaziรงi Universityโs (Istanbul, Turkey) Department of History in 2017. She received her master’s degree from the History of Art and Photography program at Birkbeck, University of London.
Centre Director Alison Bashford’s latest book, An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family has won the 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
The Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award recognises works that combine excellence in research, literary merit, readability and value to the community, and is presented by the Waverley Council. You can read more about the awards, and view the full long and short lists via the Waverley Council website.
An Intimate History of Evolution tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T H Huxley, and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Between them, the Huxleys communicated to the world the story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. It is published by University of Chicago Press & Allen Lane, and is available for purchase via the University of Chicago Press website.
The 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award was announced at the Bondi Pavilion on the 9th November 2023. Photos courtesy of Waverley Council.
Professor Alison Bashford, Laureate Centre Director, was awarded the Royal Society of New South Wales History and Philosophy of Science Medal from the Governor, Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley.
At a ceremony at Government House on 23 February 2022, Alison Bashford’s research and leadership in the history of science was recognised. The History and Philosophy of Science Medal is awarded annually by the Royal Society of New South Wales.
Professor Bashford recently delivered the Society’s Annual Lecture on The Huxleys, including their connection with Sydney and Australia. This forms part of her forthcoming book, An Intimate History of Evolution: The Huxleys in Nature and Culture (Allen Lane).
The Laureate Centre for History & Population is delighted to announce the appointment of three new postdocs and a centre manager.
Dr Naomi Parkinson, Laureate Centre Manager, is a scholar of imperial and colonial history, specialising in slavery and its aftermath in the British Empire. Most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the โInquiring into Empireโ project at UNSW, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Dr Stephen Pascoe, Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow, is a historian of cities, infrastructure, and imperialism who works primarily on the modern Middle East and the Global French Empire. Dr. Pascoe joins UNSW from the University of California, Irvine, where he was recently a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities. Dr. Pascoe also holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.
Dr Emma Thomas, Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow, is a historian of gender, labour, and colonialism who focuses on transnational histories of Oceania and Europe. Dr. Thomas joins UNSW from the University of Michigan, where she held Fellowships at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies and the Institute of Humanities. Dr. Thomasโ Ph.D. is also from the University of Michigan.ย
We look forward to their contributions to the Centre over the coming years!
Laureate Centre for History & Population Director Professor Alison Bashford has been recognised for her wide-ranging work on public health, medicine, disease control, borders, and quarantine. She is one of seven Laureates for 2021. She joins pre-eminent academics Professor Katharine Park (Harvard University) and Professor Keith Wailoo (Princeton University) in the History of Health and Medicine (Past) category.
Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has received the Public Health (Present) prize, and pioneers of an anti-cancer immunotherapy Professor Zelig Eshhar (Weizmann Institute of Science and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center), Professor Carl June (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr Steven Rosenberg (National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland) are named laureates in the Molecular Medicine (Future) category.
โI never imagined that historical work I pursued decades ago on the global management of infectious disease would be playing out before us with such force,โ Professor Bashford said. โI always thought that quarantine, isolation, masks and โplague shipsโ would remain part of our collective past, not our global present. But this is all a reminder of how history is part of our present, in all matters.
โIโm grateful that the Dan David Board recognises, each year, the significance of analysis of the human past, and honoured to be this yearโs Laureate.โ
The internationally renowned Dan David Prize, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, annually awards three prizes of $US1 million each to globally inspiring individuals and organisations, honouring outstanding contributions that expand knowledge of the past, enrich society in the present, and promise to improve the future of our world. The total purse of $US3 million makes this prestigious prize also one of the highest valued awards internationally.
The citation in full:
Prof. Alison Bashford has contributed immensely to the history of medicine and science by connecting it with global history and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population, and Honorary Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, Bashfordโs work is unusually expansive across geographies, topics, and periods.
She has led global discussion about the history of health and medicine in four major areas: quarantine and medico-legal border control; population and eugenics; the links between colonial and world health; and gender and health as a key driver of modern world history. In all these areas, Bashfordโs books, articles and public discussion offer large-scale and integrated analyses of how the twenty first century world came to be.
Her longstanding historical work on quarantine and infectious disease has been a major resource in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Bashford brings together scholars from across the world, and across many disciplines, to consider how the past and present fold together. When biosecurity threats of SARS, anthrax, and avian influenza suddenly amplified political insecurity in the early 2000s, she convened leading thinkers quickly, producing a trio of books that have deepened our understanding of that complex global moment, unexpectedly renewed with the emergence of Covid-19.
Throughout her work on eugenics, Bashford has eschewed an obvious exposรฉ history. She has been far more driven to understand how and why it flourished amongst progressivists, modernists, and reformers, and how, counter-intuitively, some anti-racists and anti-colonials also pursued eugenics. Perhaps her most original contribution has been to analyze eugenics within twentieth-century conceptions of โfreedomโ and โduty,โ along with coercion and force. Her work has linked the practice of eugenics to the emergence of a global liberal and neo-liberal order, as much as to the history of fascism to which it is typically connected.
The Laureate Centre for History & Population will launch in July 2021. Researchers based at the centre will pursue a distinctively regional perspective on how population policies emerged over the 19th and 20th centuries, and what their present legacies are, especially in a climate-changed world.
Applying a โmultiple modernitiesโ approach, we will compare Australia, Japan, India and China, analysing highly diverse polities and challenging Europe-outward theses on modernisation and development.
The aims are:
To deepen our knowledge of how different population policies were foundational to modern statecraft over the twentieth century
To reassess modern world history by centrally analysing population change and population policy, at national, regional and international levels
To understand how Asia-Pacific population policies informed United Nationsโ engagement with population issues, from 1945 to Sustainable Development Goals
To recalibrate our understanding of the political economy canon, through the first dedicated analysis of: a) population and comparative gender analysis; and b) classical political economy on Asia and the Pacific, including T.R. Malthusโs foundational writing, especially on South Asia and East Asia
To analyse the reception and trajectories of Malthusian and Anti-Malthusian thought by Asia-Pacific political leaders as well as thought leaders
To test and substantiate the โmultiple modernitiesโ thesis, by analysing population thought and policy in highly distinct polities in the Asia Pacific region.
