Alison Bashford

Laureate Professor in History and Director of the Centre for History & Population
University of New South Wales

“Reading Modern Hands: The Disenchantment of Palmistry”

Finger Prints” by Sir Fancis Galton, copyright Macmillan (1892)

Introduction by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

27th April, 2023

Aldous Huxley’s Hand, n.d. Julian and Juliette Huxley Papers, 1899-1988; Courtesy of Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University

Alison Bashford’s historical 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. Her most recent book is The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Alison Bashford is currently Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program. Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of Humanities and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She was Whitlam and Fraser Visiting Professor at Harvard University and in 2021 was awarded the Dan David Prize for her longstanding scholarship in the history of medicine.

The Nicholson Center co-sponsored a second event with Alison Bashford:

28th April (2023)–Social Sciences Tea Room

In collaboration with The Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine

The Huxley’s: An Intimate History of Evolution (University of Chicago Press), 2022

“The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution”

Alison Bashford’s new book, in conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Emily Kern

Moderator: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

A New Yorker and Economist Best Book of the Year

Two hundred years of modern science and culture told through one family history.

This momentous biography tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T. H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Between them, they communicated to the world the great modern story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. In The Huxleys, celebrated historian Alison Bashford writes seamlessly about these omnivorous intellects together, almost as if they were a single man whose long, vital life bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the Space Age, and from colonial wars to world wars to the cold war.

The Huxleys’ specialty was evolution in all its forms—at the grandest level of species, deep time, the Earth, and at the most personal and intimate. They illuminated the problems and wonders of the modern world and they fundamentally shaped how we see ourselves, as individuals and as a species.

But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Bashford’s engaging, brilliantly ambitious book interweaves the Huxleys’ momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe—for better or worse—to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption, and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.