Liaison Officer for Australia

Alan Gamlen (DPhil Geography and the Environment 2005) is a Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University. He is an expert on human migration and mobility. Alan has previously held appointments at Oxford University, Stanford University, the Max Planck Society, the Japan Centre for Area Studies, Monash University and Wellington University in his homeland, New Zealand.

In 2010-2020 he was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Migration Studies (Oxford University Press), and in 2016-17 he was Director of the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre. Alan’s research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the UK Leverhulme Trust, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the New Zealand Bright Futures Fund, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He has worked as a consultant and advisor on migration and migration policy to the World Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Organization for Migration, various United Nations agencies, and numerous national governments, regional agencies, and NGOs. He is a High-Level Advisor to the United Nations Migration Agency and an Advisory Board Member with the UN Platform on Disaster Displacement. Alan’s book, Human Geopolitics: States, Emigrants and the Rise of Diaspora Institutions (Oxford University Press 2019), won the 2020 Distinguished Book Award for Best Book on Ethnicity and Migration from the International Studies Association. He is a member of the Tainui federation of Māori tribes in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

He holds a Doctorate from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), where he studied as a New Zealand Top Achiever Scholar.  He completed his DPhil there in 2010, despite an infatuation with rowing. Alan retains close links intellectually and socially with various current and past members of the college and am delighted to serve as a point of contact for Antonians in Australia. Alan can be contacted on: Alan.Gamlen@anu.edu.au.