D. Graham Burnett's Current Interests
Professor Burnett recently undertook a new research project, courtesy of the Mellon Foundation, which is supporting his training in art history and the sciences of the brain. As part of this project, in 2009–10 he was in residence at Columbia University, where he was a fellow at the Italian Academy and worked with the artist Mark Dion and the neuroscientist Franco Pestilli. In the fall of 2009, he brought together the neuroscientist Sabine Kastner and the artist Terry Winters in a conversation with historian of science Peter Galison at the Kitchen in Chelsea.
Burnett just finished the manuscript of a book tentatively entitled Save the Whales? which is a study of the scientific study of whales and dolphins in the twentieth century. In connection with this project he organized “Lives of the Sea: A Symposium on the History of Marine Life,” a 2005 interdisciplinary conference (sponsored by the Program in History of Science and the Princeton Environmental Institute) featuring biologists, fisheries scientists, and historians who work on historical population data for marine species (see poster below). Burnett recently contributed an essay on the twentieth-century study of whales to the catalogue of an exhibit at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Click here to see this piece.
