Congratulations to Paul Burnett!
We are pleased to announce that historian Paul Burnett has been appointed the Charles B. Faulhaber director of the Oral History Center following a national search. Paul joined the OHC staff in 2013 and has focused on science, engineering, and UC Berkeley history. He has published a number of academic articles, and has developed and directed large-scale oral history projects on economics, paleontology, Czech physics, the San Francisco Opera, and engineering, among other subjects. Paul has also worked to reach a wider public with a series of online articles for the UC Library blog, a curriculum for high schools on epidemics in history, and podcasts on the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and on the rise of Silicon Valley.
Prior to joining the Oral History Center, Paul was an assistant professor with the Science and Technology Studies Programme at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. Before that, Paul researched and produced museum exhibits for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He completed his PhD at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, where he developed his research on the politics of expertise — how scientists and experts of all kinds establish their credibility, and how people choose between different kinds of expertise to try to solve complex social, political, scientific, and technical problems.
Paul is looking forward to further developing the OHC’s collection, to making the archive’s audio and video more accessible to the public, especially to students in high schools and universities, and to promoting the interpretive work of Center historians.
Please join us in welcoming Paul Burnett to his new role.