Nominated Fellow, October 2026 (previously Simon Fellow, Sep 2012 - May 2013)
Linda Andersson Burnett is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. A historian of science, she works on natural history and the circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on Linnaean science and its social, colonial and intellectual contexts. Her research takes a transnational and comparative approach, connecting Scandinavia and the British Empire.
She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2012 and has published widely on natural history, colonial knowledge and Enlightenment science. Her recent monograph, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820 (co-authored with Bruce Buchan, Yale University Press, 2025), examines how ideas about race developed through Scotland’s involvement in empire and colonial encounters, and how these ideas entered university curricula and were taught to generations of students at Edinburgh University. The book was shortlisted for the Pickstone Prize in 2026. Andersson Burnett also directs the research group Instructing Natural History: Nature, People and Empire and co-runs the international consortium WOMNH: Women in Natural History Museums and Collections, which brings together researchers and museum professionals interested in women's participation in natural history.
Project title: Savage Explorations: Carl Linnaeus and Eighteenth-Century Primitivism
During her fellowship at IASH, she will work on her monograph Savage Explorations: Carl Linnaeus and Eighteenth-Century Primitivism. The book examines how Linnaean natural history shaped ideas of “savagery” and primitivism in Sápmi and the Scottish Highlands, and how these ideas travelled between Scandinavia and Britain. It asks how natural history contributed to the reimagining of northern regions and their inhabitants as subjects of scientific inquiry, economic and moral “improvement,” and state expansion.