Professor Burnett regularly teaches the undergraduate lecture course “Science in a Global Context,” which traces developments in science and technology since 1400 with an emphasis on the place of scientific knowledge in the history of cross-cultural exchange, colonial expansion, and modern imperialism. (He co-hosted the 2002-03 Princeton Workshops in the History of Science, “Science Across the Seas: Global Science and Comparative History”). He has also taught seminars on the history of oceanography and on the history of the field sciences. In 2005 he led “Humans and Animals,” a graduate seminar that examines the role of the life sciences in changing conceptions of human-animal relationships and the human-animal boundary in the modern period, and in 2007 he taught a graduate seminar on the relationship between the history of science and political theory, “Science Technology and Social Order,” and he has also developed a course on the historical relationship between science and religion. Recent graduate teaching includes the introductory seminar on historiography and historical method, and several seminars in the Humanities Council on art and critical theory. In more recent years Burnett’s graduate teaching has focused on questions of science, technology, critical theory, and art, and he has become a regular contributor to the seminars offered under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). The Department of History and the Program in History of Science, Burnett has regularly co-taught the introductory required methods seminar for incoming graduate students, History 500, “Introduction to the Professional Study of History. Click here for the transcript of a departmental symposium on the history of this course.
Follow this link to see Professor Burnett lecturing about Moby-Dick and Oceanography.
And click here to read about the freshman seminar (“The Beast in the Sea”) that Burnett taught in the spring of 2007.