Alison Pearn

Alison Pearn is an historian and Associate Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University. Since 1996 she has been happily researching and editing the 15,000 or so letters Darwin exchanged with an eclectic network of correspondents around the world, and, thanks to her colleagues, knows more than she ever thought she would about the minutiae of 19th century life and science. She admits to some responsibility for ten of the twenty volumes of Darwin's correspondence so far published, and has co-edited a volume of selected letters. She was one of the organisers of Cambridge University's international Darwin 2009 festival, curated an exhibition on the Beagle voyage and edited a companion guide, and has contributed to a number of academic and popular books and journals. She has appeared in podcasts and in radio programmes on three continents, but so far no one has let her near a TV studio.