Alison M. Downham Moore is a historian and medical humanities scholar. She is Associate Dean of Research in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. She has previously held positions at the University of Queensland and at the University of Sydney, as well as visiting research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Germany. She holds a UK AdvanceHE Senior Teaching Fellowship. She is author of Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (2016) and co-author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an Intellectual History (2011).