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Dr Neil Chambers (Research Fellow) is the Executive Director of the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project. The project focuses on the work of the naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook on his historic Endeavour mission into the Pacific. Dr Chambers is responsible for its fundraising and has over the years held external grants from some 70 bodies amounting in total to ¾ of a million pounds. Dr Chambers also oversees editorial work on the Banks correspondence including, most recently, The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768–1820, 8 vols (Pickering & Chatto, 2008-2013). He is currently preparing a new set of volumes on the African Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks for publication. In 2014, he curated an exhibition of the Endeavour voyage collections held at The Collection (Lincoln Museum) through the assistance of a large Heritage Lottery Fund grant. The exhibition was opened by Sir David Attenborough and received a record number of visitors for this venue. Dr Chambers has published in May of this year Endeavouring Banks: an illustrated essay and catalogue volume based on the exhibition, with contributions from a number of leading world experts as well as a foreword by Sir David. Sir David Attenborough has recently discussed the Endeavour exhibition and related catalogue in an article published in The Telegraph. Dr Chambers’ broader research interests include the Royal Navy, particularly the expeditions of James Cook, William Bligh and Matthew Flinders, as well as museum collecting. He has organized conferences and given keynote addresses at the National Maritime Museum, Lincoln University, The Collection (Lincoln), and the Sir Joseph Banks Society, among other venues and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures and the Linnean Society of London. Dr Chambers regularly assists students and international scholars in various disciplines on work relating to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century travel, science and empire.
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