Dr Benjamin Hegarty

Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist and Senior Research Associate in the Asia and Pacific Health Program at the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney. His research in global health draws the insights of ethnographic methods into dialogue with queer theory, transgender studies, and science and technology studies (STS). He has applied these insights to explain and transform the structural inequalities that result in poor health outcomes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

He has completed several long-term, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health and rights. His first book, The Made-Up State: Trans Femininity, Technology, and Citizenship in Indonesia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. It was awarded the 2023 Anne Bolin and Gilbert Herdt Book Prize by the Human Sexuality Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. 

Within the Asia and Pacific Health Program, Benjamin draws on his expertise in Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) to work collaboratively with colleagues in global public health in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. His most recent research is an Australian Human Rights Institute-funded research project, Transgender rights and health in Indonesia: A rapid ethnographic assessment, which investigates access to legal and medical forms of gender affirmation and its impact on health for transgender communities. 

Benjamin serves on the editorial boards of American Ethnologist and Medicine Anthropology Theory. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania), is associate editor for gender and sexuality at the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, and an editor of the Field Notes section of History of Anthropology Review. 

In 2024-2025 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, funded by a highly competitive French Institutes for Advanced Studies (FIAS) Fellowship, and a Research Affiliate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford to complete research on symbiotic viruses in global health. This new research investigates the scientific, technological, political, and social processes that have prefigured a reassessment of the role of viruses in contributing to human health.