Dr Benjamin Hegarty

Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, global health, and HIV in Southeast Asia. He joined the Kirby Institute at UNSW as a Senior Research Associate in Global Health Equity and Justice in 2023. Benjamin's research has primarily been with transgender communities in Indonesia, with whom he has conducted long-term, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects based on ethnographic methods. These have included studies of community responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of global HIV programs on Indonesian cultures of gender and sexuality, and transgender women's access to identity documents and social services. His first book, The Made-Up State: Trans Femininity, Technology, and Citizenship in Indonesia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. As well as visiting fellowships at the University of California, Irvine (2018-19) and the University of Cambridge (2022), he was a McKenzie Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne (2019-2022). He is a member of the Editorial Board of American Ethnologist, Associate Editor of History of Anthropology Review, and the Treasurer of the Australian Anthropological Society (2022-2024). Benjamin is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for HIV AIDS Research at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta, Indonesia.