Our funding from the John Templeton Foundation (USA) was due to end on the 31st August 2020. However, there was a surplus of unspent money in our budget, so following the helpful suggestion of The Charles Darwin Trust (which manages our grant), we asked Templeton whether the grant deadline could be extended for 4 months until December 31st. Very fortunately, they agreed.
The funds will be sufficient to pay the salaries of the project's director (Dr George Beccaloni) and full time researcher (Matt Beros), and hopefully, the project's freelance Researcher & Project Coordinator (Danni Sherwood). Unfortunately, we will not be able to employ our four freelance researchers beyond August 31st.
During the four month extension, we plan to produce our Preliminary Catalogue of the Correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace, and migrate our letter transcripts and the associated metadata into Epsilon, our new online archive. We will also be seeking funding to continue the project. In particular, funds to employ the project's director/senior editor and our full time researcher for two years, in order to produce and publish volume 1 of our proposed series of books The Correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace. Volume 1 will be a weighty tome of c. 750 pages and we would really like it to be published in time for the 200th anniversary of Wallace's birth in 2023, when worldwide interest in Wallace is likely to be high (as it was during 2013, the 100th anniversary of his death). We roughly estimate that the cost of this two year project will be £200,000 GBP. If we are unable to secure funding then the entire project will have to shut down, which would be a great disappointment to the project team (some of whom have invested years in the project) and a great loss to Wallace scholars present and future. Although we now have rough drafts of the 5,700 letters which comprise Wallace's known correspondence, we still have to edit and research them to produce the 'publication quality' transcripts which scholars require.
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