Biography

Alice Pearson is an anthropologist and historian of economics. Her research explores the relationships between finance, capitalism, and economics as a discipline. She holds a PhD and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Government and Economics from LSE. From 2025, she will be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

As a Research Fellow on the ERC-funded Memory of Financial Crisis project at EUI, she examines the relationship between finance and economics since 1945, investigating how financial elites understand ‘financial crises.’ This builds on her PhD, for which she conducted a 15-month ethnography of elite economics education, interrogating the dual meanings of economics as a ‘discipline’: both as a form of knowledge and as a mode of personhood.

Dr Pearson has previously held research positions at LSE and UCL, focusing on the intersection of expertise, inequality, and governance. In these roles, she researched the impact of Covid-19 policies on social and economic inequalities for the UK government and conducted a six-month ethnography of the Bank of England’s network of Agents to trace how they assemble understandings of ‘the economy’. A consistent theme throughout her work is an interest in the relationship between anthropological, sociological, and economic theory.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Environmental challenges and climate change governance
• The memory of financial crises: financial actors and global risk
• Finance and society
• International Thinking and Planetary Futures