Dr Arunasalam Balasubramaniam has commenced a 1-year appointment as a Senior Research Fellow in the Historical Sociology of Asian Connections Metacluster with effect from 1 December 2011.

Dr Arun Bala is the author of the book The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) which shows how Asian ideas – in particular Chinese mechanical inventions and cosmological views, Indian computational techniques and atomic hypotheses, and Arabic planetary and optical theories – combined with ancient Greek ideas to generate modern science. He is also the editor of a forthcoming book Asia, Europe and the Emergence of Modern Science: Knowledge Crossing Boundaries (Palgrave, 2012).

While at ARI his research will explore how a neo-Lakatosian model for scientific method, involving the consilience of research programmes, can be deployed to explain how reservoirs of knowledge from different Asian traditions came to be epistemologically incorporated in the making of modern science.