D. Graham Burnett

Associate Professor of History
Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptor

205 Dickinson Hall
dburnett@Princeton.EDU
phone: 609-258-7309 ; fax: 609-258-5326
Website

Graham Burnett, Christian Gauss Preceptor and Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, is an historian of science, and currently directs graduate studies in the Program in History of Science at Princeton. He studies the relationship between power and knowledge, and writes on human beings' changing understanding of the natural world. His book A Trial By Jury (Knopf), tells the story of the struggle to resolve a recent Manhattan murder trial; it was a New York Times Notable selection in 2001. Burnett has taught at Yale and Columbia Universities, and his reviews and essays have appeared widely.

Publications
A Trial By Jury by D. Graham Burnett
(Knopf, 2002)

There are really two stories here: that of the case itself--a trial story, a courtroom story, a drama focused around a violent death; and that of the deliberations--the story of what happened behind the closed door of the jury room. Each of these stories is complex, and they are of course entangled. I set out to write this book in order to tell the latter, but to do so I must rehearse elements of the former. Let me be clear, though: it is by no means my intention to retry the case in a personal memoir. The case is closed. In writing this book, I have made no additional investigations of the events at issue, I have not revisited the records of the trial, and I have not interviewed any of the people involved. All of that was tempting, and would certainly have been interesting, but my sense has been that to embark on such digging would have been, inevitably, to put the trial on trial, to lose myself again in the twisting labyrinth of unrecoverable fact that we negotiated in the jury room. I would have begun to extend that labyrinth, to open new rooms and passages. And this was not the aim. I am sure there is more to the maze than I have seen (when is there not?), but by keeping notes during the weeks of the trial, I laid a thread along the path we took together as jurors, and that is the thread I will follow here.