Anuj Misra is a historian and philosopher of mathematics specialising in the study of pre-modern Islamicate and Sanskrit astronomy. From April 2024, he leads the Max Planck Research Group “Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia” (ASTRA), in conjunction with being a Professor of the History of Science and the History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Anuj is the author of several books that include his recent monograph on Learning with Spheres: The Golādhyāya in Nityānanda's Sarvasiddhāntarāja (Routledge, 2023), a technical discourse on The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasāraṇī: Numerical tables in textual scholarship (co-authored with Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker, Brill, 2020), and an edited volume on Science and Society in the Sanskrit World (along with Christopher Fleming, Toke Knudsen, and Vishal Sharma, Brill, 2023). Moreover, he regularly publishes articles and book-chapters on the sociohistorical, philosophical, linguistic, and mathematical aspects of the history of astral sciences in early-modern India. His current work focuses on the synergistic phenomena of transmission, translocation, and transcreation of astral knowledge in Asian discourses across space and time.

Anuj was awarded a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2016 for his dissertation on a seventeenth-century Sanskrit text on spherical geometry. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatoire de Paris (Systèmes de Référence Temps Espace Laboratory, 2017–18) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Department I: Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge, 2018–19). During 2019–21, he successfully conducted his project on “Early Modern Exchanges in Sanskrit Astral Sciences” (EMESAS) at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (CCRS) of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and following that, he continued at the CCRS as a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow during 2021–23 to lead the project “Changing Episteme in Early Modern Sanskrit Astronomy” (CEEMSA) as a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow.

Anuj continues to be associated with the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, as an Adjunct Senior Researcher, and with the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, as a Visiting Research Fellow.

WiSe 2024/25

• Thinking Across the Divide: Mathematics, History, and Society
• Mathematics, Society, and the Mind: A Seminar Series

The group "Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia" (ASTRA) studies the transmission, translocation, and transcreation of astral knowledge across space and time in Asian discourses. By examining the kinetics of astral learning across Asia, the group highlights the complex and ever-changing relationship between society and science from multilateral perspectives.

More details about ASTRA can be found here.