Dr Charles Read teaches economics and history at the University of Cambridge, where he an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History and a fellow and lecturer at Corpus Christi College. The research for his PhD dissertation on British economic policy during the Irish famine of 1845-53, the worst economic-policy disaster in modern British and Irish history, has won three academic prizes from the Economic History Society and a further dissertation prize from the International Economic History Association.

Charles is also a prolific author of articles about business, economics and finance for a number of publications including The Economist and The World In.