Laureate Team
Alison Bashford
Alison Bashford is Laureate Professor of History at the UNSW and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population. Prof. Bashford’s research connects the history of science, global history, and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Contact: a.bashford@unsw.edu.au

Aprajita Sarcar
Aprajita Sarcar will join the Laureate Centre as a postdoctoral fellow in July 2022. Her work examines the everyday governance of population in India, one of the first Asian countries to embark on a national population control program in 1951.

Rimi Nandy
Rimi Nandy, Laureate Centre PhD candidate, is interested in the construction of population policies as a tool of continued colonial governance in the global south. Her doctoral work explores the historical and social production of early-age hysterectomies in India.
Contact: p.nandy@unsw.edu.au
Emma Thomas
Emma Thomas, Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow, is a historian of gender, labour, and colonialism who focuses on transnational histories of Oceania and Europe.
Contact: emma.thomas@unsw.edu.au

Naomi Parkinson
Naomi Parkinson, Laureate Centre Manager, is a scholar of imperial and colonial history. Her work examines slavery and its aftermath in the British Empire, with a particular focus on its legacies in shaping legal and governmental reform.
Contact: n.parkinson@unsw.edu.au
Stephen Pascoe
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.
Contact: stephen.pascoe@unsw.edu.au
Distinguished Scholars in Residence

Margaret Jolly
Margaret Jolly, Emerita Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language (College of Asia and the Pacific) at ANU, is a transdisciplinary scholar of gender and Pacific studies. Professor Jolly has written extensively on gender in Oceania; exploratory voyages and travel writing; missions and contemporary Christianity; maternity and sexuality; and cinema and art. Her current work focuses on gender and climate change in Oceania.
Laureate Senior Research Associates

Pratik Chakrabarti
Pratik Chakrabarti is Chair in History of Science and Medicine at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.

Duncan Kelly
Duncan Kelly is Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College. His research explores intellectual history and political theory, particularly of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

David Nally
David Nally is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Cambridge University and Fellow of Jesus College. His research has addressed colonial authority and subsistence crises, global land grabbing, technology and agrarian systems, and the relationships between population control and food production.

Samita Sen
Samita Sen is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on gender and labour. Her specialization is colonial South Asia but she has also done contemporary and interdisciplinary research on issues such as domestic violence and labour in the informal sector.

Louise Edwards
Louise Edwards is Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at UNSW. She publishes on women and gender in China and Asia.

Angela Leung
Angela Leung is Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and Joseph Needham-Philip Mao Professor at the University of Hong Kong. She has published in Chinese, English and French on the history of Chinese philanthropy and social history of medicine.

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is a Chancellor’s Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) and Affiliated Scholar with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Simon Szreter
Simon Szreter is Professor in History and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. His main fields of research are demographic, public health, economic and social history, the history of empirical social science and methods for registering and measuring populations, and the relationship between history and contemporary public policy issues.

Shailaja Fennell
Shailaja Fennell is Director of Research at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, Reader in Regional Transformation and Economic Security at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Jesus College.

Robert Mayhew
Robert Mayhew is Fellow and Senior Tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research is at the interface of historical geography and intellectual history, a particular interest for the past decade being the ideas and legacies of Malthus.

John Pullen
John Pullen is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New England Business School. His research interests include urban economics, the history of economic thought, and Thomas Robert Malthus. Prof. Pullen is the editor of Malthus’ correspondence and of numerous editions of the Principles of Political Economy.

Aya Homei
Aya Homei is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester. She specialises in the history of East Asian science, technology, and medicine, with particular interests in the history of midwifery, discourses on Japanese population, Japanese family planning in Southeast Asia, and the science of old age.
Peter McDonald
Peter McDonald is Emeritus Professor of Demography in the School of Demography, Australian National University and a CI of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. Professor McDonald’s work is focused on population policy, immigration, labour force and ageing in Australia; on the demography of Indonesia; and on theory relating to low fertility, the implications of low fertility for population futures and upon related policy options.
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is Associate Professor, Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and Director of Program in Global Health and Ageing at Columbia University. Her interests and expertise are in the contemporary history of medicine and science in South Asia, the politics of infectious disease and epidemics, and the history of population anxieties in global health.
Affiliated Researchers

Tiarne Barratt
Tiarne Barratt is a HDR candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW. Her doctoral work investigates the role of history in COVID-19 new and traditional medias and the strategic function of history in pandemic responses.

Jarrod Hore
Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian of settler colonialism and colonial geology. His book, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism, is forthcoming with University of California Press.

Adam Bobbette
Adam Bobbette is a geographer and Lecturer in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. His interests lay primarily in the relationship between geology and politics in Southeast Asia since the late nineteenth century.

Emily Kern
Emily Kern is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where she researches and teaches the intellectual and cultural history of modern science. She is currently at work on a book about the history of paleoanthropology and the search for the cradle of humankind.

Michelle Bootcov
Michelle Bootcov is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages. She is researching the 20th century scientific and medical history of viral hepatitis.
Contact: m.bootcov@unsw.edu.au

Joel Wing-Lun
Joel Wing-Lun is an historian of late imperial and modern China and, from 2022, Lecturer in History and Asian Studies at UNSW. His research uses fieldwork and documents from local villages to examine the social, economic and environmental impact of imperial expansion on communities in Southwest China, and what the transformation of the region meant for the China as a whole.

Chi Chi Huang
Chi Chi Huang is an environmental and medical humanities historian of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow on the UNSW-based SRI ‘Rethinking Medico-Legal Borders’.