Alistair Sponsel

Alistair Sponsel joined the Institute as oral historian and curator of life sciences in 2025. He most recently worked as historian of the life sciences and associate director of the Center for Humanities & History of Modern Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and he has held teaching appointments at Harvard, Vanderbilt, and Tufts universities.

Alistair earned his PhD in history of science from Princeton University. He is the author of Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2024–2025, as Emanuel Fellow of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, he initiated a collaborative project entitled “Documenting traditional knowledge of coral reefs in the Society Islands and the Tuamotu Archipelago.”

For more information on Alistair’s research and publications, visit his website here.