Jessica Kirk is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. Prior to joining Monash, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Queensland.

Her research focuses on the global politics of health, with a particular focus on how health links with ideas of security, the contested role of expertise within health emergency response, and the growing challenge of mis- and disinformation. She has published on these themes in her book, More than a Health Crisis (MIT Press, 2023), which examined the US response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and in multiple journal articles, including those in International Studies Quarterly, Political Studies, and International Political Sociology.

Her current research projects includes an ARC Discovery Project on the Politics of Expertise during COVID-19 and an ARC DECRA project on the Global Management of Health Misinformation. The former is a project with colleagues from Griffith University and focuses on the contested role of public health experts during COVID-19, comparing four different federal-level responses. The latter is a new project examining how different global-level initiatives understand and respond to the problem of health mis- and disinformation. This project will identify how effective different initiatives are, what practices have been successful in addressing health misinformation, and where further progress can be made.