Linda Andersson Burnett

I research natural-history travel, colonial collecting and the conceptual history of 'savagery' and 'race'. I am the PI of the research team Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire. Here you can read about some of the research that I do within this program:

Early Citizen Science: How the public used Linnaean instructions to collect the World c.1750-1850.

Collecting Humanity: Prehistory, Race and Instructions for ‘Scientific’ Travel, 1750-1850

Nominated for AcademiaNet, an expert database for outstanding female academics, by the Swedish Research Council, 2022.

Member of the Jury for the History Award 'Stora historiepriset', From 2022.

Wallenberg Academy Fellow, 2019-present

Member of the Young Academy of Sweden (Sveriges Unga Akademi), 2020-2025

The Swedish Delegate in the International Young Academies Science Advice Structure, 2021-ongoing.

Leader of interdisciplinary research group on Nordic Colonialism at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, 2014-2019.

Utmärkelsen Framstående forskare, Linnaeus University, 2019.

Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral fellow at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. 2013-2019. During this period I was research leader of two externally-funded projects: Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of the Enlightenment and The Sami in the Atlantic World which was part of the program Collecting Sápmi: Early Modern Globalization of Sámi Material Culture and Contemporary Sámi Cultural Heritage.

Postdoctoral Researcher in the Project Writing the North (Outreach project between the University of Edinburgh and the Museums and Archives on Shetland and Orkney.

The Simon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, 2012-2013

Researcher in project on patronage in Norway and Scotland, University of Aberdeen & Volda University College, 2011-2012

Ph.D. in History, University of Edinburgh, awarded 2012. Title: Northern Noble Savages: Edward Daniel Clarke and British Primitivist Narratives on Scotland and Scandinavia, c. 1760-1822.

Magnus Magnusson Memorial Essay Prize for best article on Northern Studies, 2008.

School of History & Classics Scholarship award, University of Edinburgh, 2007.

MSc in English literature and B.A Honours in history, also from the University of Edinburgh.

I research eighteenth and nineteenth-century natural-history travel, collecting and conceptual debates about 'savagery' and 'race'. I am the principal investigator of the research team Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire. It includes scholars and research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council, Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation (Wallenberg Academy Fellowship) and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

My research projects in this program are: Early Citizen Science: How the public used Linnaean instructions to collect the world. This project analyses the role of instructions for colonial collecting and how science developed through engagement between universities, museums and the lay public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The project runs between 2021 -2026 and includes postdoctoral researchers and guest researchers. You can read about the project here.

Between 2020-2025, I am also conducting the research project Collecting Humanity: Prehistory, Race and Instructions for ‘Scientific’ Travel, 1750-1850. The project studies the emergence of the concept of 'race' from a Swedish-British history of instructed scientific travel, collection and museum display of peoples deemed prehistoric. I am carrying out this project with Associate Professor Bruce Buchan at Griffith University. You can read more about the project here.

I have recently finished the project The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of the Enlightenment. It was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2016-2019). The project analysed the intellectual amalgamation of Linnaean natural history and the Scottish stadial theory of historical progress and how this intellectual framework was communicated to students of medicine and natural history at the University of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century. It studied how these students, who travelled and worked extensively throughout Britain’s empire, reflected on human diversity in colonial contexts and how they constructed humanity as a domain with variable boundaries. You can read some of this research in a special issue of The History of the Human Sciences (2019, vol 32 issue 4): https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/hhsa/32/4 and in a forthcoming monograph.

You can find other publications and read more about my research at my Academia.edu page: https://uppsala.academia.edu/LindaAnderssonBurnett