Populating Global History
Biopolitics/Geopolitics/Cosmopolitics
A Final Laureate Symposium
07 August 2026
State Library of NSW – Dixson Room
Synopsis
Populating Global History brings together the many historians employed within Scientia Professor Alison Bashford’s research projects at UNSW, Sydney. How have modern histories of land, disease, governance, humans, and other animals been rethought? Is it useful to understand modern history as a folding of geopolitics, biopolitics, cosmopolitics, and microbial politics? Conversations began in 2019 with the New Earth Histories Research Program, followed by the Laureate Centre for History & Population (2021-26), and a suite of Australian Research Council-funded history of science projects (Antipodean Geology, Rethinking Medico-Legal Borders, Race Science and the Human Hand). In this final symposium, early career historians will be joined by distinguished senior professors, in conversation.
Program
| Friday, 07 August 2026 – State Library of NSW – Dixson Room | |||
| Speakers | Chair | ||
| 9 – 9.15 am | Guest Arrival | ||
| 9.15 – 9.30 am | Opening Remarks | Prof David Armitage | |
| 9.30 – 11 am | Session 1: Cosmopolitics: New Earth Histories | Dr Jarrod Hore A/Prof Emily Kern Dr Adam Bobbette | A/Prof Alessandro Antonello |
| 11 – 11.30 am | Morning Tea & Coffee | ||
| 11.30 am – 1 pm | Session 2: Biopolitics: Population, Economies, Labour, Gender | Dr Aprajita Sarcar Dr Emma Thomas Dr Stephen Pascoe Dr Sarah Kennedy Bates | Prof Marilyn Lake |
| 1 – 1.30 pm | Lunch | ||
| 1.30 – 3 pm | Session 3: Geopolitics: Population, Waste, Land, Animals | Dr Leo Chu Dr Matthew Birchall Dr Nicholas Pitt Dr Sheila Ngọc Phạm | Prof David Armitage |
| 3 – 3.30 pm | Afternoon Tea & Coffee | ||
| 3.30 – 4.45 pm | Session 4: Microbial Politics: Medicine and Disease | Dr Michelle Bootcov Ms Cong Liu Ms Tiarne Barratt-Young Ms Rimi Nandy | Dr Peter Hobbins |
| 4.45 – 5.15 pm | Closing Remarks | Prof Joanna Bourke | |
| 5.15 – 6 pm | Drinks | ||
Contributing Scholars
A/Prof Alessandro Antonello
Alessandro Antonello is Associate Professor of environmental history and UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment and Heritage at the University of Tasmania. His work the histories of Australia’s marine and coastal environments, Antarctic environmental knowledge and geopolitics, the cryosphere, and the world ocean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is author of The Greening of Antarctica (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Prof David Armitage
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is also Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of History at Queen’s University, Belfast. He co-edited with Alison Bashford Pacific Histories (2013)andOceanic Histories (2017, with Sujit Sivasundaram). His most recent co-edited book isThe Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives(Oxford, 2026).
Ms Tiarne Barratt-Young
Tiarne Barratt-Young is a third-year PhD candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. Her doctoral research investigates the role of historical analogy in COVID-19 mass media, pandemic narratives, and the strategic function of history in moments of crisis. Her earlier research focused on the history of surgical contraception in twentieth-century Australia. She was research associate on the ARC-funded project ‘Rethinking Medico-Legal Borders’, led by Alison Bashford and Jane McAdam (Law, UNSW). Tiarne has published in Social History of Medicine.
Prof Alison Bashford
Alison Bashford FBA FAHA is Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population, UNSW Sydney. She also co-directs the New Earth Histories Research Program. Previously, she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, and Whitlam and Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. She is Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and from September 2026 Fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her most recent book, Decoding the Hand, has been shortlisted for the Pickstone Prize.
Dr Sarah Kennedy Bates
Sarah Kennedy Bates was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population at UNSW, Sydney, from 2025 to 2026, following PhD (Harvard). She is a historian and social anthropologist of Global Political Economy with a particular interest in Southeast Asia. Her research examines changing understandings and measures of poverty and wellbeing amongst economists and social scientists, and explores everyday community experiences of rapid economic transformation and class politics across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is currently the Research and Program Officer for the Partnerships for Decent Work Program at Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA, the international solidarity arm of the Australian union movement, supporting workers’ climate and gender justice struggles in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Dr Matthew Birchall
Matthew Birchall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population, following PhD in History (Cambridge). He works on the economic and intellectual history of colonisation in Australia and New Zealand, with a particular focus on chartered companies. In 2022, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize for best scholarly article based upon original research.
Dr Adam Bobbette
Adam Bobbette was postdoctoral fellow in New Earth Histories at UNSW, 2019-21. He is now Lecturer of Political Geology in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. His book The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke) won the 2025 Harry J. Benda Prize. His writing has appeared in the TLS, LRB, and e-flux, and his research has been featured by the BBC and National Geographic. His collaborations with artists have been shown at the Venice Biennale (2027) and MoMA (NYC). He is co-editor, with Bashford and Kern, of New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2023). His book The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (2023) was awarded the 2025 Harry J. Benda Prize by the Association of Asian Studies. His current book on the political geology of critical minerals, Earthworks: Mineral Life in Critical Times (Verso), will be published in 2027.
Dr Michelle Bootcov
Michelle Bootcov is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, following a PhD in History of Science and a previous PhD in molecular immunology (UNSW). Bootcov traces the production and transformation of biomedical knowledge in the twentieth century. She has also published on Australian migrant and women’s history. She received the Dan David Scholarship Prize in 2021, the Mike Smith Student Prize for History from the Australian Academy of Science in 2024.
Prof Joanna Bourke
Joanna Bourke OBE FBA is Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Professor Emerita at Gresham College. She is the prize-winning author of 18 books on sexual violence, modern warfare, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, pain, and what it means to be human. Her most recent book is Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion Books 2026).
Dr Leo Chu
Leo Chu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population at the UNSW, after PhD in history of science from Cambridge. A historian of agriculture and environment, he specialises in the exchange of development knowledge between Cold War Taiwan and Southeast Asia. His research has been published in Rural History, Agriculture and Human Values, and Cultural and Social History.
Dr Peter Hobbins
Dr Peter Hobbins leads the manuscripts acquisition and curation team at the State Library of NSW. As a professional historian, his research has spanned medical research, venomous creatures, epidemics, quarantine, aviation and maritime history. Peter is the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as two books (with a third due for publication in 2027).
Dr Jarrod Hore
Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian of settler colonial landscapes, nature writing, and geology. He is a Scientia Lecturer in the School of Humanities & Languages and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His first book, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (University of California Press), was published in 2022 and awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Marilyn Lake Prize for Transnational History in 2023. His second book, Deep Earth: How Colonial Geologists Rewrote Our Planet’s Story (Polity, 2027), tells the story of how three generations of colonial geologists became expert mediums of a changing planet by searching the globe for minerals and resources.
A/Prof Emily Kern
Emily Kern was postdoctoral fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at UNSW, 2019-21, and is now is the History of Science Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago, where she is also a member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization. Her work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the earth and life sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is co-editor, with Bashford and Bobbette, of New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and author of The Cradle of Humankind: Science and the Making of African Origins (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
Prof Marilyn Lake
Marilyn Lake AO FAHA FASSA FBA is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She has held academic positions at Monash University and La Trobe University, where she was Charles LaTrobe Professor in History in 2010. She held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2001/02. Between 2013-16, she held an Australian Professorial Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, where she was Director of the ‘Australia in the World’ program of lectures, seminars and conferences.’ Her most recent book is Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Ms Cong Liu
Cong Liu is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, supervised by Alison Bashford and Joel Wing-lun. Her research investigates Japan’s wartime infectious disease control programs in East and Southeast Asia (1930s to 1945). In July 2026, she presented her research at an East Asian History conference in Cambridge.
Ms Rimi Nandy
Rimi Nandy is a PhD candidate at the Laureate Centre for History and Population at the University of New South Wales. Her doctoral work investigates the socioeconomic, sociomedical, and cultural production of large-scale, early-age unindicated hysterectomy amongst specific population clusters in India. Rimi is also an award-winning literary translator, primarily of Bangla classics and children’s speculative fiction into English. She has published recently in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.
Dr Stephen Pascoe
Stephen Pascoe is Lecturer in History and Area Studies at the University of New South Wales. He was postdoctoral fellow in the Laureate Centre for History & Population (2021-24). He is a historian of cities, infrastructure, population and imperialism who works primarily on the modern Middle East and the global French Empire. He received a BA (Hons) in History and Arabic from the University of Melbourne in 2004, an MPhil in Urban Planning from the Melbourne School of Design in 2011 and a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine in 2019. Prior to coming to UNSW, Stephen was a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.
Dr Sheila Ngọc Phạm
Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population, following a PhD from Macquarie University, Sydney. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, focused on end-of-life care and cervical screening for refugee populations. Her research interests are wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary, and as an independent researcher and writer, her recent work focuses on multiculturalism, migrant histories and Australian speculative fiction.
Dr Nicholas Pitt
Nicholas (Nick) Pitt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population. He is a historian and archaeologist who focuses on the human and more-than-human networks shaped by British colonisation and empire, specialising on eastern Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 2025, he was the Merewether Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales.
Dr Aprajita Sarcar
Aprajita Sarcar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for Population and History. She works on the everyday governance of the population control policies in postcolonial India. Her research brings together the historiography on global population planning, reproductive politics and urban histories of South Asia. She was awarded a PhD from the Department of History, Queen’s University, Canada in 2020. She is co-editor (with Bashford and Homei) of Populating the 1980s: A Global Decade Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Dr Emma Thomas
Emma Thomas was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population at UNSW, Sydney, from 2021 to 2024, following PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2019. Her research focuses on histories of gender, labour, and colonialism in the Asia-Pacific. Grounded in extensive archival research conducted in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Germany, her current book project analyses intersections of gender and sexuality, labour regimes, violence and demographic concerns in Papua New Guinea under German colonial rule (1884-1914). Her research interests also include Pacific conceptions of reproductive health and healing and their dynamic relationships to colonialism, economic and environmental change, human and women’s rights discourses, and processes of medicalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For more info, contact the Laureate Centre Manager, Katrien Verbeke (k.verbeke@unsw.edu.au)