About the Contributors

DOI

10.34663/9783945561232-04

Citation

Renn, Jürgen (2012). About the Contributors. In: The Globalization of Knowledge in History. Berlin: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.

Oscar João Abdounur is Associate Professor of the Mathematics Department of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Within his general field of research of epistemology, history and didactics of mathematics, he focuses in particular on the interrelationships between mathematics and music as well as on the globalization of mathematical knowledge in Brazil.

Ligia Arantes Sad is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Federal University in Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil. She continues to teach in the masters and doctoral program in education and is a collaborative teacher in the professional masters program in science and mathematics at the Federal Institute in Espírito Santo. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics, epistemology and cultural diversity in interaction with mathematics education.

Angelo Baracca is Professor of Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. He is actively engaged in the movements for peace and disarmament and has devoted himself professionally to the study of nuclear technology—both civil and military—as well as its structure and history. Besides teaching and research activities in many fields such as high-energy physics, statistical mechanics, and the foundations of quantum mechanics, his interests focus on the history and social responsibility of science.

Jens Braarvig is Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. He is founder and, from 1992 until 2001, director of the Network for University Cooperation Tibet-Norway; founder in 1997 of the Akkado-Sumerian Seminar; editor-in-chief from 1998 of Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection; founder and director from 2003 of the Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology. Since 2004 he is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and since 2011, of the Mahachulalongkorn University, Bangkok.

Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum is Professor of Assyriology at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Within her general field of research (the anthropology, history and languages of the ancient Near East), she focuses in particular on the role of writing as an epistemological technique, and the modes of knowledge transmission both within and between different cultures.

Adriana Cesar de Mattos is Lecturer in the Mathematics Department of the Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho,” Rio Claro, Brazil. Within her general field of research on mathematics education and sociology, she focuses in particular on the process of recognition of a theory or a name, on the history of mathematics as a political and epistemological phenomenon and on the globalization of mathematical knowledge in Brazil.

Peter Damerow (1939–2011) was a mathematician, philosopher, educational researcher and historian of science. In 1974 he became a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he worked on the development of mathematics curricula. From 1994 he worked as a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His interests lay in the history of science and education, individual and historical development of cognition, the genesis of writing and arithmetic and the history of mathematics and physics in the ancient and early modern periods. In 2010 he developed the idea of an open access, print-on-demand book series, which was then realized as the Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge.

Hansjörg Dilger is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin where he is also head of the research area “Medical Anthropology.” He conducted longterm fieldwork on HIV/AIDS and social relations in rural and urban Tanzania and is co-editor of “Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa” (Oxford, 2010). Currently, he is working on a book project entitled “Religion, Education and the (Transnational) State: Unequal Histories and Subject Formation in Christian and Muslim Schools in Dar es Salaam.”

Yehuda Elkana has taught history and philosophy of science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and at Tel-Aviv University (1968–1999), and one year at Harvard University. He was Director of the van Leer Jerusalem Institute (1968–1993). From 1987–2006 he was Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin; from 1994–1999 he was Professor of Wissenschaftstheorie at the ETH, Zurich; he was President and Rector of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest (1999–2009). He is a corresponding member of the International Academy for the History of Science. In 1987 he founded the journal Science in Context (CUP). His current research is on the University of the 21st Century with emphasis on curricula at the Wissenschaftskolleg and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Kostas Gavroglu is Professor of History of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He is also Director of the Laboratory of the Electronic Processing of Historical Archives (http://www.phs.uoa.gr/dlab) and President of the Executive Board of the Historical Archive of the University of Athens (http://www.archive.uoa.gr). He is a member of the Executive Board of the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation (http://www.latsis-foundation.org). His research fields are the history of physical chemistry, the history of quantum chemistry, the history of artificial cold as well as issues related with the appropriation of the scientific ideas and practices by the European periphery from the eighteenth century.

Denise Gimpel is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Culture and Deputy Head of Institute at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research focuses on the literature and intellectual history (especially East-West perceptions) of the late Qing dynasty and the Republican era (ca. 1850–1949) as well as on issues of somatic engineering and gender in China.

Gerd Graßhoff is Professor for History and Philosophy of Science, formerly at Bern University, now Professor for History of Ancient Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2010 Gerd Graßhoff has been director of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI. His research fields cover the history of ancient science from Babylonian astronomy to modern times, methods of scientific discovery and philosophical models of causal reasoning.

Hans Falk Hoffmann has been a CERN staff member since 1972, working on collider studies, integrating experiments into colliders, as technical coordinator of the UA1 and ATLAS experiments at CERN and as team leader of the CERN CMS team. He held positions as Director of Central Services at DESY, Director of Technical Support and Director of Technology Transfer and Scientific Computing at CERN, launching grid computing. He has proposed and collaborated on several EU framework projects on physics for medicine and grid computing, UNESCO projects on digital libraries and the participation of CERN in the UN/ITU World Summit of the Information Society. He was member of the European Science and Technology Assembly, ESTA (1994–1997), to advise the EU Commission on Science and Technology. He is now retired and CERN “honorary.”

Jarita Holbrook is a Research Scientist in the Women’s Studies Department at UCLA. She holds degrees in physics and astronomy, and a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published works on indigenous African astronomy, navigation by the stars, and the intersection of astronomy and race in the United States. She is completing a book on the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme in South Africa. Her films include “Hubble’s Diverse Universe” and the forthcoming “Micro-X.” She is the chair of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Ludmila Hyman is Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Her research interests include history of psychology, language and thought, concept formation, and rhetoric.

Malcolm D. Hyman (1970–2009) received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2002. He was a Research Fellow, first at Harvard University and then at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research interests lay in general linguistics, natural language programming, writing systems and terminology. He was a developer of open source research software applications and contributed to developing facilities for large-scale access to multilingual historical corpora and pioneering cyberscholarship applications.

Daniel Klingenfeld (MPP, M.Sc.) is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and of ESCP Europe. He is currently working for the Advisory Council on Global Change to the German Government (WBGU) as a research analyst to Professor Schellnhuber. Concurrently, he is pursuing doctoral studies with Professor Edenhofer, focusing on global climate policy architectures.

Arie Krampf is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG) “The Transformative Power of Europe” at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His research interests focus on the role of economic ideas in international political economy and comparative politics, global governance, social learning and constructivist political economy. He studies in particular the translation of monetary and macroeconomic ideas and practices from developed to developing countries. In addition, he studies the Israeli political economy.

Birgit Krawietz is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University in Berlin and Principal Investigator at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Her research focuses on Islamic jurisprudence and cultural history.

Manolis Patiniotis is Assistant Professor in History of Science at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Athens University. He is also a tutor and a module coordinator in the program of European Culture Studies of the Hellenic Open University. He delivers courses on Scientific Revolution and the Sciences during the Enlightenment. His research interests include the impact of Newton’s natural philosophy on various intellectual environments in the eighteenth century, the appropriation of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century natural philosophy by the scholars of the European periphery, and the application of information technology in historical inquiry. He participated in the construction of the digital libraries Hellinomnimon and Katoptron (http://www.lib.uoa.gr/katoptron) and he is a founding member of the international community for the history of science and technology in the European Periphery (STEP, http://www.uoa.gr/step).

D.T. Potts is Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He is the founding editor of the journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Society of Antiquaries and a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. His interests range widely over Mesopotamia, Iran, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, from prehistory to the early Islamic period.

Dhruv Raina is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Education at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the first Chairholder of the Heinrich-Zimmer Chair for Indian Philosophy and Intellectual History at Heidelberg University. He studied physics at the 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. He has published papers on related subjects in journals of the history and philosophy of science, social studies of science and social and political history. Over the last couple of years he has been working on cultures of history and science policy in postcolonial South Asia, in addition to a decade long preoccupation with postcolonial theory of science and the historiography of Indian mathematics.

Jürgen Renn is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University and the Free University in Berlin and member of the Leopoldina. His research focuses on the history of ancient and early modern mechanics, the history of relativity and quantum theory and the interaction between cognitive and contextual factors in the history of science.

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Honorary Professor at the Technical University in Berlin. He is a Member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and of the Leopoldina, and he holds a honorary doctoral degree from the ETH Zurich. The focus of his research is in the history of the life sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and in the history and epistemology of experimentation.

Richard Rottenburg holds a chair in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Halle (Germany) and is Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle). His research focuses on the anthropology of law, organizations, science and technology (LOST). He has written and edited books on economic anthropology, networks of formal organizations, the transcultural production of objectivity, biomedicine and society, and on theorizing post-neoliberal governance.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber CBE is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). He is also Professor for Theoretical Physics at Potsdam University. From 2005–2009, he was Visiting Professor in Physics and Visiting Fellow of Christ Church College at Oxford University as well as Distinguished Science Advisor for the Tyndall Centre. Since 2010, he has been an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Matthias Schemmel is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and heads a TOPOI Excellence Cluster Research Group on the Historical Epistemology of Space. His research focuses on the long-term development of spatial cognition, the history of early modern mechanics, the history of modern physics and astronomy and the history of Chinese science.

Mark Schiefsky is Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of philosophy and science in the Greco-Roman world, especially medicine and mechanics. He has published a commentary on the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine along with several articles on ancient medicine, mechanics, and mathematics. From 2001 to 2004 he was a principal investigator on the Archimedes Project, an international initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to create a digital library for the history of mechanics and mechanical technology in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Robert Schlögl is Director at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. In 2011 he was appointed founding director at the newly planned Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. His research focuses primarily on the investigation of heterogeneous catalysts, with the aim to combine scientific with technical applicability, as well as on the development of nanochemically-optimized materials for energy storage. The application of knowledge-based heterogeneous catalysis for large-scale chemical energy conversion summarizes his current research focus. He is author of about 800 publications and registered inventor of more than twenty patent families. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and member of numerous international organizations.

Circe Mary Silva da Silva is Adjunct Professor and researcher at the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Espírito Santo in Brazil. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bielefeld and is dedicated to research on the history of mathematics in Brazil, mathematics education and cultural diversity.

Gotthard Strohmaier is Honorary Professor at the Seminary of Semitic and Arabic Studies of the Free University in Berlin, Member of the Academia Europea, Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich and Sectional Editor for History of Science and Medicine at the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden).

Helge Wendt is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is associated with the project “Globalization of Knowledge.” He received his Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim. His research focuses on the history of Christian missions in different colonial contexts, the history and historiography of globalization and environmental history.