Exploring Traditions: Sources for a Global History of Science

Project Team:

Principal Investigator:

Dr Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge

Co-Investigators: 

Professor Simon Shaffer, University of Cambridge

Award Information:

Historians and philosophers of science are currently in the midst of a global turn.  They are asking fundamental questions about what science has meant on the global stage, and how sciences have come to take form through global confrontations, connections and politics.  This proposed Research Network picks up on these developments, by aiming to link an international centre for the study of global histories of science, namely the University of Cambridge, with scholars working in South Asia and Africa. It seeks to develop research-based training resources at the graduate and post-doctoral levels in global histories of science. By aiming to interpret the artefacts, both archival and material, which have arisen out of science’s global histories, the project will come to terms with the status of the ‘indigenous’ in science, and also questions of ownership, expertise and truth-making when tied to inter-cultural contact.

The Network begins in May 2013 with a series of events devoted to the visits to the University of Cambridge of two leading theorists of global science: Prof Irfan S. Habib from Delhi and Prof. Keith Breckenridge from South Africa. For more information on these events please follow this link: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2458/.