D. Graham Burnett
Department/Program(s):History of Science
Position: Professor
Title: Professor of History.
Area(s): History of Science
Field: Cartography, Oceanography, Exploration; Natural History and Environmental Science; Science, Technology, and the Arts
Office: 205 Dickinson Hall
Phone: 609-258-7309
Email: dburnett@princeton.edu
Office Hours: M 10.00-11.00 and 2.00-3.00
Navigation
Recent News
Burnett has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his current project “Minding the Eye.” For the full announcement, see here.
On May 25, Burnett will be presenting at Home Works 6 in Beirut.
And, for all the whale lovers out there, Burnett will be ratcheting on about the finicky bits of dead cetaceans at the Smithsonian in early June, in connection with the new exhibition "Whales: Bones to Book."
Burnett and friends will be back at Mildred's Lane this summer, August 5 to 11. More information here.
On May 7, Burnett presented a short talk titled “The Metachrotic Swan Song” for the opening of School of Death, an educational institution dedicated to exploring the relationship between death and the examined life, organized by Cabinet magazine and philosopher Simon Critchley, at the gallery Family Business in Manhattan. More here.
Burnett was seconded to the Creative Destruction Consultancy, which held an open-house at the New Museum's Ideas City festival on Saturday, May 4. More details here.
At the beginning of May, Burnett and the artist Natalie Jeremijenko presented a project on the history (and future) of plant acupuncture at IHUM's big fauna shindig.
Burnett hosted an exhibition/symposium at MoMA on “artistic research” on Thursday, April 18, at 12:30 p.m., featuring research-artists Sal Randolph, Steve Rowell, Brooke Singer, and Alexandra P. Spaudling. More here.
On Friday, April 12, Burnett participated in the symposium “What Is Cosmopolitical Design?” at the Princeton School of Architecture, giving a talk entitled “The Amphibious Laboratory: Think Tank for a Cetacean Nation.” For a full description and schedule, click here.
On Thursday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m., Burnett presented “A Subway Death: Reflections in the Dark,” the “Year in Faith” lecture, at Ascension Church in upper Manhattan. For more information, see here.
Burnett and conspirators were in residence at the Haut Ecole D'Art et de Design, Geneva, March 18–24, running a series of attention workshops for ESTAR-SER.
Burnett spoke at "Radical Enlightenment: A Symposium on Cybernetics and the Soul," at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, on March 15. The symposium took place in conjunction with the Joachim Koester exhibition "Reptile Brain or Reptile Body, It's Your Animal." For more, click here.
On Friday, March 8, at Columbia, Burnett was one of four speakers on a panel entitled “Climate Change, Methods, and Practice: A Conversation across the Social Sciences and Humanities.” It went from 1 to 3 p.m. and was at Columbia's Morningside Heights Campus. For more, click here.
On Friday, March 1, Burnett presented “Critical Play: Gaming, Reading, Writing,” as part of the panel “Form: Aesthetic, Social, Biological” in the symposium “Representing Complexity: Intersections of Art and Science” at the University of Maryland. For more information, click here.
Burnett kicked off a big whale session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston on Sunday, February 17—a video of the presentation is featured on the conference website here.
This spring semester, Burnett and Sal Randolph are teaching a program seminar on "Attention" for IHUM at Princeton. Click here for more.
Burnett was one of fourteen participants in a trial of Cabinet magazine, which took place at the NYPL on Wednesday, January 30, at 6 p.m. The trial coincided with the publication of the magazine's recent anthology, Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (in which Burnett is also featured; more on the book below). For more on the event, click here. The Wall Street Journal previewed the evening here.
On Friday and Saturday, January 25 and 26, Burnett will be speaking at the third roundtable of the ongoing event "The Fifth Geneva Convention: Nature, Conflict, and International Law in the Anthropocene." The roundtable goes all day on Friday and Saturday at the Centre for Research Architecture in London (full address here); for more on the event, go here.
In conjunction with the exhibition “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” at the New Museum, Burnett and others presented “An Afternoon of Fauna: From Ants to Whales.” It was the afternoon of Saturday, January 12, from 2 to 6 p.m., at the New Museum. For more information and to buy tickets, click here.
On Saturday, January 12, at 7:30 p.m., Burnett moderated “In the Valley of the Uncanny: Humans and Humanoids,” presentations and a panel featuring artist Laurie O'Brien, filmmaker Allison de Fren, neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar, and artist John Bell. The event took place at Union Docs, in Brooklyn; for more information, click here.
Burnett is featured, alongside an extensive roster of other artists, writers, and scientists, in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine. The over-500-page anthology takes the form of > an illustrated encyclopedia, with idiosyncratic entries including Addiction, Animal Architecture, Goalkeeping, Micronation, Otolith, Sandal, Worlding, and Zoosemiotics. For more (including a link to buy with a 25 percent discount!), go here. The publication continues the conversation begun at a symposium of the same name held in April 2011 at Princeton. For more on the symposium, see here.
On Thursday, the 6th of December, Burnett met Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Eva Díaz for a discussion about Argentinian artist Gyula Kosice and Pérez-Barreiro's new book, Gyula Kosice in conversation with/en conversación con Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. The event was at Cabinet in Brooklyn; for more, click here.
On Wednesday, October 10, Burnett and Cornel West were in conversation as the keynote for “Pro+Agonist: The Art of Opposition,” an evening on “the productive possibilities of ‘agonism,’ or a relationship built on mutual incitement and struggle.” The event was a launch for a book of the same title, edited by Marisa Jahn, and also featured other contributors to the book. It took place in Cooper Union’s Great Hall; for more, click here.
Burnett joined Richard Sieburth and Tirdad Zolghadr on Thursday, September 20, at Cabinet, in celebration of Zolghadr’s new book, Plot, for a conversation about lists and their relationship to language, literary forms, and techniques of self-organization. For more, click here.
On the 28th of July, Burnett participated in another of Cabinet's "Fairs for Knowledge," this one on "American Fauna" at the former home of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Poetry Lab, Burnett and Jeff Dolven's semi-regular series at Cabinet, returned on July 26 with “Everyone and I and Frank O'Hara.”
Burnett and friends were in residence at Mildred's Lane this year, sifting the mysteries of the Order of the Third Bird.
Profile
D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science, and recently held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship. The recipient of a 2009 Mellon New Directions Fellowship, he is currently working on connections between the sciences and the visual arts. 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 seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including cartography, navigation, oceanography, and ecology/environmentalism. 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 nineteenth century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), a monograph on Cartesian thought and seventeenth-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 book Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2007 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History and the New York City Book Award in 2008. (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.) The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century is his most recent book; listen to a recording of Burnett speaking about it here. Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, Harpers, 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. In 2008 he became an editor at the Brooklyn-based art magazine Cabinet, and he also 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, the Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Infrastructure, and the Princeton Environmental Institute.
Recent Publications
1. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (University Of Chicago Press, 2000)
2. A Trial by Jury (Knopf, 2001)
3. Descartes And The Hyperbolic Quest: Lens Making Machines And Their Significance In The Seventeenth Century (American Philosophical Society, 2005)
4. Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007)
5. The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century
