Research Fellow
Alice Pearson is an anthropologist and historian of economics. Her research combines ethnography, political economy and history to examine shifting contours of capitalism. Alice holds a PhD (2021) and MPhil (2015) in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Government and Economics from LSE. She is a co-founder and convener of The Politics of Economics group based in CRASSH at Cambridge.
As a Research Fellow on the ERC-funded Memory of Financial Crisis project, she is focusing on the relationship between finance and economics since 1945, asking how financial elites understand financial ‘crises’. This builds on her PhD, for which she conducted 15 months’ ethnography of elite undergraduate economics education to interrogate the relationship between dual senses of economics as a ‘discipline’: as a form of knowledge and as a form of personhood.
Dr Pearson is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She has previously held research positions at LSE and UCL, examining the intersection between expertise, policy and governance. During these, she researched the impact of Covid-19 policies on social and economic inequalities for the UK government, and conducted 6 months’ ethnography of the Bank of England’s network of Agents to explore how they assemble understandings of ‘the economy’. Throughout her work runs an interest in the relationship between anthropological and economic theory.