Darwin Correspondence Project staff

Jim Secord: Director

Jim Secord has served as Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project since 2006.  He also is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ’s College. Besides his work for the Darwin Project, his research is on the history of science from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and he has published many articles and several books, including Controversy in Victorian Geology (Princeton, 1986) and editions of the works of Mary Somerville, Charles Lyell, and Robert Chambers. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000), an account of the public debates about evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, won the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. He has recently written on scientific conversation, scrapbook-keeping, and public scientific displays. His most recent book is a selection of Darwin’s evolutionary writings in the Oxford World’s Classics, which includes a fresh transcription of the autobiographical Recollections and responses to Darwin’s books from around the world. He is currently completing Nature as News, a study of the relation between scientific practice and the newspaper press in London, Paris, and New York.

Janet Browne: General Editor, United States

Janet Browne’s interests range widely over the history of the life sciences and natural history. After a first degree in zoology she studied for a PhD in the history of science at Imperial College London, published as The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (1983). Ever since then she has specialised in reassessing Charles Darwin’s work, first as associate editor of the early volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, and more recently as author of a major biographical study that integrated Darwin’s science with his life and times. While it was framed as a biographical study, the intention was to explore the ways in which scientific knowledge was created, distributed and accepted, moving from private to public, as reflected in the two-volume structure of the work.

UK Staff

Rosemary Clarkson, MA, DAA

Rosy has a degree in Greek and Latin and is a trained archivist. These qualifications enable her to undertake a range of tasks from answering the telephone to attempting to read Darwin’s notoriously poor handwriting.

Samantha Evans, PhD

Samantha copy-edits all editorial material, draws up schedules, typesets galleys, does picture research, supervises the in-house production process, and liaises with CUP production editors. She also does a fair amount of footnoting in otherwise idle moments, and occasionally writes for the website. Her background is in classics and publishing.

Shelley Innes, MA

Shelley is primarily a footnoting editor, but has also contributed to the ecology section of the website. Although her background is in the history of zoology, since joining the Project in 2000, she has become an enthusiastic follower of Darwin’s botanical work as well. Her favourite correspondent is Fritz Müller. She hopes more people will read Darwin’s fantastic barnacle books and stop asking why he spent so much time on barnacles. Barnacles are brilliant!

Alison Pearn, PhD: Assistant Director

Alison joined the Project in 1996.  Her background is in history, with a BA from Oxford, and a PhD from Cambridge.  She curated the University Library’s Darwin Bicentenary exhibition, and edited a companion book, A Voyage Round the World: Charles Darwin and the Beagle Collections of the University of Cambridge (CUP 2009).  She is responsible for the day-to-day management of all aspects of the Darwin Project, including its outreach programme, gives both academic and popular lectures on its work, and has appeared on radio programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s In our Time, and Woman’s Hour. She has a particular interest in Darwin’s correspondence with James Crichton-Browne, superintendent of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. Oh yes – and she bakes.

Elizabeth Smith, MPhil

Elizabeth has an MPhil in HPS from Cambridge and has worked for the Newton Project Canada. She does a little bit of everything for the Project, from proofreading transcriptions and double-checking bibliography entries, to page layout, to research and preliminary footnoting.

Paul White, PhD

Paul’s responsibilities include researching the context of the letters, writing footnotes and introductions to the volumes, outreach work and scholarly publications, and teaching in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. He oversees the Darwin and religion pages of the website and help to develop teaching materials for schools and universities. His special interests include the history of the emotions, and the interface of science and literature.

US Staff

Alistair Sponsel, PhD

Alistair Sponsel is a historian of the earth and environmental sciences.  He is especially interested in scientific expeditions, and he first studied Darwin’s correspondence to learn about the development of Darwin’s theory of coral reef formation during the Beagle voyage.  Alistair’s favourite Darwin letter was written in Tierra del Fuego on 18 July 1833.  On this cold day in the middle of the southern winter, Darwin told John Stevens Henslow that “the very thoughts of the fine Coralls, the warm glowing weather, the blue sky of the Tropics is enough to make one wild with delight.”