Name: Dhruv Raina
Designation: Honorary Professor
Email: d_raina@yahoo.com
Biodata: Dhruv Raina was Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he taught the history and philosophy of science. He studied physics at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Göteborg University. His 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 and his co-edited and authored books on the subject include Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (OUP 1999) and Needham’s Indian Network (Yoda 2015). With S. Irfan Habib he authored Domesticating Modern Science (2004) and co-edited Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (2007), while Images and Contexts: the Historiography of Science and Modernity (2003) was a collection of papers contextualizing science and its modernity in 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 within postcolonial theory. Earlier formulations of these concerns are reflected in the volume edited with Feza Gunnergun of Istanbul University entitled, Science between Europe and Asia (Springer2010). 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 fields that transgress boundaries of the natural and social sciences. Another volume co-edited with Hans Harder of Heidelberg University entitled Disciplines and Movements; was published in 2022. He has been a visiting professor of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg du Berlin (Institute of Advanced Study), the first incumbent of the Heinrich Zimmer Chair in Intellectual History and Indian Philosophy, Heidelberg University and Visiting Fellow at ETH, Zurich, and Cambridge University etc. He was elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2018. He was also a visiting professor at the Excellence Cluster Africa -Europe, University of Bayreuth, 2022-2023. and has been the Visiting D.D. Kosambi Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Goa University since 2017. He is currently Visiting Faculty at IISER, Pune and IISER Mohali.