Contributors & Acknowledgments

Contributors

Alison Bashford is the Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Director of the Laureate Centre for History and Population. 

Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University. 

Meehan Crist is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. 

Duncan Kelly is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. 

J.R. McNeill is a Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University.

David Nally is a Professor of Historical Geography, a Director of Studies in Geography and a Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge. 

Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and an affiliated professor of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Harvard University. 

R. Sánchez-Rivera is a Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). 

Matthias Schmelzer is Professor for Social-Ecological Transformation Research and director of the Norbert Elias Center at the University of Flensburg, Germany.

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is an Associate Professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

Julia Adeney Thomas teaches history at the University of Notre Dame.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and was chair of the Anthropocene Working Group from 2009 to 2020. 

Acknowledgments

In July 2024, the editors convened “How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?” at Jesus College, Cambridge. Support for that conference and this publication has been gratefully received from the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship FL200100144, the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney, from a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant, and from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. We are also grateful to the master and fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge, for the use of rooms and for support with the practicalities of conference organization. We thank Katrien Verbeke for excellent assistance with communication, meetings, editing, and production, Bud Bynack for meticulous copyediting, and Peter Sahlins for driving Prickly Paradigm “pamphlets” into a new era.

We gratefully acknowledge Sage Publications for permission to reproduce Fig. 0.1 and the Royal Institute of International Affairs for permission to reproduce Fig. 7.1. All other tables and figures are reproduced under a Creative Commons license or with the permission of the respective author.

Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly, David Nally

Alison Bashford FBA is Scientia Professor of History at University of New South Wales, Sydney and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She has written many books on population and eugenics, including Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia, 2014).  She is co-editor of New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago, 2023) and Gondwanaland: The Modern History of an Ancient Supercontinent (Pittsburgh, 2026). 

[Author photo: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/697698603622227be199c7cb/90373d1d-6876-45fc-8384-d8099f5a8928/Alison+Bashford.jpeg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg]

Duncan Kelly is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies, at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is a long-standing co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History, and the author of Politics and the Anthropocene (Polity, 2019), alongside Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford, 2025).

[Author photo: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/697698603622227be199c7cb/372ee54a-99f1-4b19-8c2d-8fe7de58796a/Duncan+Kelly.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg]

David Nally is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. His research interests include famines, colonial policy, agrarian politics, and American philanthropy. He has published a book on the Irish Famine, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame University) and co-authored a textbook, Key Concepts in Historical Geography (Sage). A volume on the global significance of tuber plants, edited with Olivia Angé, will appear in Yale's Agrarian Studies Series in 2026.

[Author Photo: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/697698603622227be199c7cb/16d0f2f6-70f5-4587-8ee1-2e603163e11c/David+Nally.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg]

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