Princeton University

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science, and recently held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship. Professor Burnett graduated from Princeton in 1993 as the salutatorian and a recipient of the Pyne Prize. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship he completed a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University (1997 [2001]), where he was a member of Trinity College. Burnett was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography, and he has been editorially involved with the History of Cartography Project. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001 he taught at Yale and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University (1997-1999) and an inaugural fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (1999-2000). His interests include the history of natural history and the sciences of the earth and the sea from the 17th through the 20th centuries, including cartography, navigation, and hydrography. His recent research has examined the role of the geographical sciences in European colonialism. He has also worked on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and early modern optics. His first book, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), examines the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the 19th century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), a monograph on Cartesian thought and 17th-century lens making, and A Trial By Jury (2001), a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. His most recent book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Trial That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2008 New York City Book Award and the 2008 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History.  (You can see Burnett talking about Trying Leviathan at the Smithsonian here; and click here for an interview with Burnett about the writing of the book). Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, the Economist, the American Scholar (where he served two terms on the editorial board), Daedalus (where he was a contributing editor), the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic.  He recently became an editor at the Brooklyn-based art magazine Cabinet, and he serves on the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and at Princeton he is affiliated with the Program in History of Science,  the Law and Public Affairs Program, and the Princeton Environmental Institute.