Alison Bashford, PhD
Scientia Professor of History, Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Born in 1963 in Sydney, Australia
BA (Hons and Medal) in History, University of Sydney, MA in History, University of Cambridge, PhD in History, University of Sydney
Project
Lands Before Time: Atlantis, Lemuria, Gondwanaland
Colloquium
Lands Before Time
Historians across the world are thinking about the modern history of deep time. Perhaps a response to the Anthropocene, the history of the Earth is now everyone’s business. Certainly, it is now the work of humanities and social science scholars, in conversation with geologists, geophysicists, and palaeontologists who have long documented a dynamic Earth, oceans and continents shifting and moving, putting Earth into its chrono-stratigraphy. That is a history of vast eons, epochs, and eras. Taking a relatively modest 500 years, in this project I aim to follow ideas about a terraqueous and dynamic Earth through three place-worlds that are as much lands before time, as lands in time: Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland. Across many registers, from Bacon’s New Atlantis (500 years) to Ernst Haeckel’s nineteenth-century Lemuria to the plate tectonics of Gondwanaland, and from the imagined to the real and beyond, where are these lands before time? What work have they done? And – at the start of this project – how can I best approach them conceptually and analytically?
Publications from the Fellow Library
Bashford, Alison (Chicago, 2025)
Decoding the hand : a history of science, medicine, and magic
Bashford, Alison (Chicago, 2023)
New earth histories : geo-cosmologies and the making of the modern world
Bashford, Alison (Chicago, 2022)
The Huxleys : An Intimate History of Evolution
Bashford, Alison (London, 2021)
Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland
Bashford, Alison (Cambridge, 2018)
Oceanic histories Cambridge oceanic histories
Bashford, Alison (New York, NY, 2016)
Global population : history, geopolitics, and life on earth Columbia studies in international and global history