Temporalidades – Revista Discente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da UFMG. v. 6 (Suplemento, 2014) – Belo Horizonte: Departamento de História, FAFICH/UFMG, 2014. ISSN: 1984-6150 - www.fafich.ufmg.br/temporalidades 1504 Interview with Dr. D. Graham Burnett Tradução: Deise Simões Rodrigues. Revisão: Brian Zack. Revista Temporalidades: The scholars of the History of Science in Brazil have enjoyed a productive dialogue with American authors. Anglo-Saxon historiography has become a methodological and theoretical reference point for our own researches in the History of Science; an example is the appropriation of concepts such as the paradigm of Thomas Kuhn. Could you tell us if Kuhn and such other researchers as Martin Rudwick, Stephen Jay Gould, and Charles Percy Snow - remain significant influences on the production of History of Science in the United States? Who would be the new references in this field? Could you please also comment on those scholars whose work has particularly influenced your own? Professor Burnett: Kuhn’s work remains significant, and is still required reading for everyone in the field. Each of the other authors you mention can still be read productively: I think quite a few people who find their way to technical scholarship in the history of science first encounter the idea of historicizing science in one or another of Gould’s essays; anyone working in the history of geology must still reckon with The Great Devonian Controversy, though I don’t believe that Rudwick’s general analytic for scientific change has been taken up by many scholars working on other instances of “dispute resolution” in the sciences; at this point C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” thesis is better thought of as itself a part of the cultural history of the sciences in the 20th century, and the close study of the ramifications of his statement/diagnosis sheds much light on the place of science and technology in the Cold War, a period shot through with anxieties about decolonization, technocracy, and global economic development (I took up these issues in some detail in “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science” 1 , which examines the reverberations of the Snow-Leavis conflict in the “third world”). What are the newer works that really matter now? Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump is at this point, I think, every bit as foundational as Kuhn. My own work has been informed by readings of Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, James Secord, Robert Richards, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and— formatively, in my case—Greg Dening. 1 D. Graham Burnett, Daedalus Vol. 128, No. 2, (Spring, 1999), pp. 193-218