|
Dhruv Raina graduated with a B.Sc. (1978) from Bangalore University and a M.Sc. (Physics) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1980). As fellow of the Indian Council of Philosophical research he was affiliated with the National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) and in 1991 was appointed as Scientist at that very Institute. He obtained a doctorate in the philosophy of Science from Göteborgs University. In 2002 he was appointed Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and has been professor since 2004. He teaches history and philosophy of sciences as well education. In 2007 he was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) and in 2010 was the first incumbent of Heinrich Zimmer Chair for Intellectual History and Indian Philosophy. He has also served as the honourary director of the Northern regional Centre of the ICSSR.
Academic and Research Achievements: Dhruv Raina’s research has focused upon the politics and cultures of scientific knowledge in South Asia both in historical and contemporary contexts, as well as the history and historiography of mathematics. He has for long engaged with the work of Joseph Needham. In 1999 he co-edited Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (1999) with his colleague and collaborator S.Irfan Habib, and in 2015 published his most recently authored book Needham’s Indian Network. The history of science in colonial South Asia has been a pressing concern and he and Irfan again authored Domesticating Modern Science (2004) and co-edited Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (2007). The concerns of postcolonial theory of science and the historiography of sciences in global context have been constant concerns and his book Images and Contexts: the Historiography of Science and Modernity (2003) was a collection of papers contextualizing science and its modernity in India. His research has also focused upon the institutionalization of the history of sciences as an interdisciplinary field as well as the more recent STS in contemporary India. The turn towards historiography and the social theory of science resulted in the interrogation of the big picture of the history of sciences and the modalities of its subsequent reworking. Earlier formulations of these concerns are reflected in the volume he edited with Feza Gunnergun entitled, Science between Europe and Asia (2010). Two areas of interest that have remained with him for over two decades concern the historiography of mathematical proof and the historiography of mathematics in South Asia on the one hand, and the work of the French Jesuit astronomers and ethnographers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most recent work addresses the contemporary concerns of the circulation of concepts in the social sciences, the emergence of inter- and transdisciplinary fields of research. This concern with interdisciplinary fields has resulted in a collaboration with mathematicians and physicists working on econophysics and sociophysiocs, and fields that cris-cross the natural and social sciences.
Other Contribution: Dr. Raina is on the Editorial and Advisory Boards of several journals such as Dialogue: Science, Scientists Society, Indian Academy of Sciences; Romanian Journal of Indian Studies;, Viaggiatori: circolazioni, scambi ed esilio (escoli XII- XX), Italy; Journal of Thai Interdisciplinary Research; Philological Encounters (Berlin); Current Science; Indian Journal for the History of Science,; and was on the Advisory Committee that drafted Technology Vision 2035: Educational Technologies.
Awards and Honours: He has been a visiting fellow of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the first incumbent of the Heinrich Zimmer Chair in Intellectual History and Indian Philosophy, and Visiting Professor at the ETH, Zurich, University of Cambridge; Visiting Professor at Université Paris Diderot; Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgesichte, Berlin and many other universities in India and abroad. More recently he was appointed to the D. D. Kosambi Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies, Goa University, (2017-2020); and served as Adjunct Professor of History of Science, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Chandigarh, (2010-2014) and was Council Member, Indian Council for Philosophical Research for one term. In 2011, he was appointed Honorary Member of the Società Indologica “Luigi Pio Tessitori”, Udine, Italy. |
