Burnett is the author of two books, one on popular storytelling and the other on style and form in the art film. Wrestling’s Greatest Stories (2008) is a trade paperback on the development of US professional wrestling as a storytelling form. The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market (2017), inspired by the work of art historian Michael Baxandall, offers a detailed history of the artmaking of an auteur regarded as cinema’s Mozart. The book grounds Robert Bresson’s restrained style of filmmaking not in personal inspiration or biography but in the socio-cultural conditions of midcentury France—the very conditions that gave rise to auteur cinema itself.

Burnett is completing a third book, entitled Serial Bonds: The Shaping of 007 Stories. It is the first to consider the British James Bond franchise as a cross-media narrative experience. The franchise presents consumers of popular fiction with a form he calls threaded storytelling. Geared toward market saturation and imbuing the original Ian Fleming stories with value, this form comes together when a franchise’s media construct distinct continuities adapted from the original source. The book traces this narrative multiplicity—Bond’s continual threading of numerous media and the continuities they produce—to early 20th century serial fiction, to the postwar British market for media franchises, and ultimately to the franchise’s internal structure—its split-rights and fragmented production regime. Today, Bond’s cross-media experience makes it distinct from properties like Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and The Matrix, which favor transmedia storytelling, a single, unified story told across media.

A couple of additional projects are currently under preparation. A book entitled Roger Leenhardt and Cinema’s Realist Revolutions will be the first-ever monograph on critic and theorist André Bazin’s forgotten but influential mentor, Roger Leenhardt, and his role in the invention of art cinema storytelling itself through his fiction and nonfiction cinema, critical and theoretical writing, and strategic roles as a producer, festival organizer, and co-creator of the journal Cahiers du cinéma. A short monograph entitled Patterns in Playland: Storytelling in Walt Disney Theme Parks will extend the historical poetics approach to theme parks, challenging the notion that parks are designed to be immersive. Lastly, a co-authored monograph will build on the findings of Serial Bonds to look at another non-US franchise, the iconic Winnetou property, a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style film franchise that arose when the original novels, authored by Karl May, entered the public domain in 1960s Germany.

Professor Burnett serves as associate editor of JCMS, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the field’s flagship peer-reviewed publication. He has lectured in East Asia and Western and Central Europe. 

At WashU,  he teaches Introduction to Film Studies, the Media Industry Professionalization Workshop, French Film Culture, Global Art Cinema, James Bond and the Modern Media Franchise, Film Theory, and Advanced Moving Image Analysis & Criticism. He has supervised numerous graduate and undergraduate research projects, on such topics as historical poetics in the modern horror film, Chinese James Bond comics from the 1980s, French documentary and literary culture in midcentury France, world-building in modern literature and media franchising, streaming (SVoD) services in contemporary France, the Indian New Wave as a transnational phenomenon, virtual reality as a personal identity problem, the representation of HIV/AIDS in US film, transgressive feminist cinema in the Soviet Union, and non-realist filmmaking during China's Urban Generation. He has also served on several MFA thesis committees at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.