Biography

Alice Pearson is an anthropologist and historian of economics. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Government and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Alice’s research examines relations between economics, finance and capitalism. Based on 15 months’ ethnography of elite economics education, her PhD interrogated the relationship between dual senses of economics as a ‘discipline’: as a form of knowledge and as a form of personhood. As a Research Fellow on the ERC-MERCATOR project, she is asking how economists and financial elites understand financial ‘crises’.

Prior to EUI, Alice has held research positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and University College London (UCL), exploring the intersection between expertise, inequality and governance. This included six months’ ethnography of the Bank of England’s network of Agents, examining how they assemble understandings of ‘the economy’. Throughout her work runs an interest in the relationship between economics and other social sciences.

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