JEREMY TREVELYAN BURMAN, PhD, is tenured Senior Assistant Professor (UD1 with indefinite contract) of Theory and History of Psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The primary focus of his research is Jean Piaget, but he is also interested more generally in the formalization and movement of scientific meaning—over time, across disciplines, between languages, and internationally. To pursue these interests, he uses methods borrowed from the history and philosophy of science (esp. archival study) and the digital humanities (esp. network analysis).
Selected recent major works
Burman, J. T. (in press). The genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget. In W. Pickren (Ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of the History of Psychology. Oxford University Press.
Burman, J. T. (2020). On Kuhn’s case, and Piaget’s: A critical two-sited hauntology (or, on impact without reference). History of the Human Sciences, 33(3-4), 129-159. doi:10.1177/0952695120911576
Burman, J. T. (2019). Development. In R. J. Sternberg & W. Pickren, eds, The Cambridge Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology (pp. 287-317). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Every once in a while, someone invents a new way to describe what scholars do. The results are typically quantitative. Sometimes they’re also quite useful, in the sense of providing a “thin description” (as a corollary to Clifford Geertz’ meaning-full thick description) of whatever it is you want to know. […]
Every once in a while, someone asks me a bunch of really good questions and I am inspired to write a long email in reply. Although I try to limit this to an hour, sometimes I write quite a lot very quickly. Sometimes some of it is even half-clever.
This short text was written as part of the follow-up to a discussion from my master course, “Boundaries of Psychology,” which includes classic and interdisciplinary readings related to boundaries, boundary-work, boundary objects, incommensurability, and other similar concepts. The text is a lightly edited excerpt from an email to my students […]
The October 2020 issue of History of the Human Sciences is a special (double) issue dedicated to the memory of John Forrester (1949-2015). In their introduction, editors Chris Millard and Felicity Callard situated my contribution relative to their view of the whole: Burman (2020) takes us on a journey, inserting Piaget in […]
I have created this site as a way to collect my work, keep everything organised, and share. The menu at the top-left will take you to various standard pages that academics always provide: bio, teaching, research, and CV (as well as some other goodies). And the main page is effectively a blog, where I aim to share things in a more timely fashion. Click on the titles for more.
[Republished from UKrant.] On 9/11, Jeremy Burman – now an assistant professor at the RUG – was a student in Toronto, Canada. There was nothing we could have done to prevent what happened that day, he says. But now with the corona crisis, we can make a difference. “We decide how many people die.”
[Republished from Mindwise.] Dr Burman decided to write several dozen haiku about the History of Psychology. For fun. As part of his Christmas vacation. Here, he also used the challenge of navigating the poetic constraints of its formalism to reflect on writing and creativity.
[Republished from Mindwise.] Dr Burman was invited to speak at Young Talent Grants Week. Then, 48 hours before the event, his Veni grant application was rejected. But that’s okay.
In his comment included in the special issue of History of Psychology that I edited with Ivan Flis and Nadine Weidman, Ted Porter (UCLA History) said this of our efforts: It rarely suffices merely to count things, for they may also require to be classified…. The problem can be especially thorny for the “psy” disciplines, where it applies […]
In her comment included in the special issue of History of Psychology that I edited with Ivan Flis and Nadine Weidman, Melinda Baldwin (now of History at the University of Maryland) said this of our efforts: As a historian of scientific publishing, I am excited by the possibilities of such […]
