Linda Andersson Burnett is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. A historian of science, her research examines the creation, circulation, and transformation of knowledge in early modern natural history, with particular emphasis on Linnaean science in its social, colonial, and epistemic contexts. Her work places Linnaean science within a transnational and comparative framework focused on Scandinavia and the British Empire.

She received her PhD from University of Edinburgh in 2012 and has since 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 and published by Yale University Press in 2025), examines how Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed ideas about race in the context of imperial expansion and colonial encounters, with particular attention to lesser-known travellers and natural historians. The book is currently shortlisted for the Pickstone Prize. Andersson Burnett also directs the research group Instructing Natural History: Nature, People and Empire and co-founded the international consortium WOMNH: Women in Natural History Museums and Collections, which promotes collaboration between researchers and museum professionals.

During her fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, she will work on the monograph Savage Explorations: Carl Linnaeus and Eighteenth-Century Primitivism, which explores how Enlightenment ideas of “savagery” were applied to northern Scandinavia and northern Britain as Europe’s internal “savage” frontier.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.