Warwick Anderson

As a medical student, Anderson began writing and publishing poetry. More than forty poems have appeared in a range of leading journals in Australia and the US. His poetry collection, Hard Cases, Brief Lives (Adelaide: Ginninderra, 2011) was short-listed in 2012 for the Mary Gilmore Award of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL).

In 2011, the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded Anderson a Laureate Fellowship, making him the first historian to receive this award and the only applicant from the humanities to receive a fellowship in the initial round. The fellowship supported comparative, transnational research in the history of ideas of race and human difference in the Global South. These studies involved collaborators from Brazil, New Zealand, and South Africa, and over the course of the fellowship supported six post-doctoral fellows.

Anderson was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2007–08), and he was a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2005–06), which he held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2013 he was a Whitney J. Oates Fellow at the Humanities Council, Princeton University and a John Hope Franklin Fellow at Duke University.

Anderson was the founding editor of Health and History (1998), and served as associate editor for the East Asian STS Journal and Postcolonial Studies. He served on the councils of the American Association of the History of Medicine (AAHM), the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine, the Australian Society of Health, Law and Ethics, History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA), the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne), and the Pacific Circle.

Anderson completed a Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His dissertation was on US colonial medicine and public health in the Philippines, and his advisor was Charles E. Rosenberg. Before moving to Sydney, Anderson held appointments at Harvard University (1992–95); the University of Melbourne (1995–2000); University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley (2000–2003); and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003–07). At Melbourne, he founded the Centre for Health and Society (1997), and helped to establish the Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit (1998). At Madison, he was chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics.

Anderson ("Dr. Androgen") was a co-presenter on the award-winning radio program "Spoonful of Medicine" (3RRR) from 1987–88.

Anderson graduated from the University of Melbourne Medical School with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1983. During the medical course he conducted neurophysiology research, supervised by Ian Darian-Smith, which earned him a Bachelor of Medical Sciences (1980). He was an intern at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and had paediatric training at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, and the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. In the 1986 season he was the assistant doctor for the Footscray Football Club (now the AFL Bulldogs). From 1987, he worked in general practice in the inner west of Melbourne, which he continued intermittently until 1999.

Warwick Hugh Anderson (born 10 December 1958), medical doctor, poet, and historian, is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, where he was previously an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2012–17). He is also honorary professor in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of New South Wales, from which he received the History and Philosophy of Science Medal in 2015. For the 2018–19 academic year, Anderson was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. As a historian of science and medicine, Anderson focuses on the biomedical dimensions of racial thought, especially in colonial settings, and the globalisation of medicine and science. He has introduced anthropological insights and themes to the history of medicine and science; developed innovative frameworks for the analysis of science and globalisation; and conducted historical research into the material cultures of scientific exchange. His influential formulation of the postcolonial studies of science and medicine has generated a new style of inquiry within science and technology studies.

Anderson was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia, where he attended the University High School. His father, Hugh McDonald Anderson (1927–2017), was a leading folklorist and historian of Australian popular and literary culture, with more than forty books to his credit; his mother, Dawn Anderson, has written books on drama education and creativity.