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 and Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. His ethnographic research draws on queer theory and transgender studies to explain how gender and sexuality influences social and health inequities. His research has investigated this concern primarily among transgender communities in Indonesia, with whom he has conducted long-term, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects related to gender, sexual, and reproductive health. 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, he is drawing on collaborative approaches to ethnographic methods to work with colleagues in Papua New Guinea, to better understand the interplay between health and human rights for key populations. He is also leading a 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 in Indonesia. This research is supported by the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW Sydney and the Center for HIV AIDS Research at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta, Indonesia.

From September 2024 until June 2025, he will be on leave from the Asia and Pacific Health Program at the Kirby Institute, to take up a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris funded by a highly competitive French Institutes for Advanced Studies (FIAS) Fellowship entitled Symbiotic viruses: More-than-human anthropology, queer theory, and virology. Bringing together scientists from the Pasteur Institute and Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), the project will investigate the symbiotic possibility of viruses through an empirical, multisited account of the human pegivirus.