Andrew Buskell

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech where I research and teach in the history and philosophy of recent science, with a focus on the evolution of human culture and cognition.

My current research project focuses on the history and philosophy of anthropological and archaeological efforts to define and study human populations and the distinctive kinds of risks and harms that this research can engender. This work extends past work that explore the sciences of culture, in particular, the growing work on cultural evolution. As part of this research, I was the PI of the grant "Culture as a Tool: Reckoning with Past and Future Use" (funded by the CES Transformation Fund) from 2023–2024.

This project has another origin in earlier work on the metaphysics of culture. From 2019–2022, I was supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, on the project "Counting Cultures", which analyzed the history of the culture concept alongside parallel developments in the grounding of cultural groups. As part of this project, I was co-PI of the grant "Culture at the Macro-Scale: Boundaries, Barriers, and Endogenous Change" (funded by the University of Cambridge, PSL, and the Embassy of France) from 2021–2022.