History Research Seminar: Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic

17.00-19.00, 12 November 2025

Fylde Lecture Theatre 1, Lancaster University

The Victorian Hand, in collaboration with the Lancaster University History Research Seminar, welcomes Professor Alison Bashford of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, to present her new ​book, ​Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic.

Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History and Population. She also directs the New Earth Histories Research Program. Her work connects the history of science, global history, and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Random House, 2022), one of The Economist's top books of 2022, and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, 2023. Alison Bashford has recently focused on the geopolitics of world population, presented in two books: The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population, with Joyce E. Chaplin (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia University Press, 2014). Before taking up her Research Chair at UNSW, Alison Bashford was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Trustee of Royal Museums, Greenwich, UK. In 2009-10, she was the Whitlam and Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science. Alison Bashford is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Australian Academy of Humanities. In May 2018, she presented the Wiles Lectures at Queen's University, Belfast. Alison Bashford was awarded the Dan David Prize for her contribution to the history of health and medicine in 2021.