Alison Bashford, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

Lands Before Time: Atlantis, Lemuria, Gondwanaland

This is a history of three lost worlds: Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland. Mythic and real, over centuries they have been created and recreated by the philosophically learned, the geologically and bio-geographically trained, and the religiously inspired. Across registers from the strictest earth sciences to eco-poetry, from the landscape pedagogies of botanical gardens to the design of Gondwanaland theme parks, these lands before time have been persistently linked in modern worldmaking. Why? How? And with what effect on our understanding of the Earth’s past and future?
Lands Before Time analyses four kinds of knowledge claims: those explicitly fictional or fabled (e.g. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis); those hypothesized within a scientific method (e.g. Ernst Haeckel’s Lemuria); those that have been falsified or verified in scientific traditions (e.g. current plate tectonics that substantiates “Gondwanaland” as real, but not “Lemuria”); and finally cosmological belief systems (e.g. Christian theologies of the age of the Earth; twentieth-century Theosophy and Anthroposophy of Lemuria and Atlantis). In the tradition of New Earth Histories (Bashford, Kern, Bobbette, 2023), this project understands historically analysable earth knowledge to exceed as well as include earth science and its natural history antecedents.
How did the linked Antiquities of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland become the landscapes through which human time and deep time were worked out, and by historical actors ranging from geoscientists to Gond indigenous people to Theosophists? How did this political geology translate into actual geopolitics (India’s claim to parts of Antarctica, for example, argued through an ancient Gondwanaland territorial connection)? What can Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland yield for the present?

Recommended Reading

Bashford, Alison, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Jarrod Hore. “Towards a Modern History of Gondwanaland.” In “Environmental History”, edited by Simon Goldhill and Georgie Fitzgibbon, supplementary issue, Journal of the British Academy 9, no. s6 (2021): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009s6.005.
Bashford, Alison. The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Bashford, Alison, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds. New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Kolloquium, 22.09.2026

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?

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

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