Subrata Dasgupta

Education

He received his schooling at Bemrose School, Derby (UK) and La Martiniere Calcutta. He holds a first class bachelor of engineering (B.E.) degree in metallurgy from the University of Calcutta having studied at Bengal Engineering College (later, Bengal Engineering and Science University, now the Indian Institutes of Engineering Science and Technology), India’s second oldest engineering school. His graduate studies were at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where he obtained the M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in computer science in 1974 and 1976 respectively.

Academic

He has taught at Ohio State University, University of Alberta, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (where he was the first Dowty Professor of Computer Systems Engineering). Since 1993, he has held the Computer Science Trust Fund Eminent Scholar Chair in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is also a professor, Department of History and, from 1999 to 2013 was the Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He has held visiting appointments in Wolfson College, Oxford, the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), the Indian Institute of Science and the Center for the Development of Advanced Computing, C-DAC (Bangalore, India), Aachen Technical University, and the University of Oldenberg (both in Germany). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Dasgupta has featured in interviews and articles in multiple BBC Radio programs, British national newspapers and magazines, Indian national newspapers, and regional Spanish and Canadian newspapers. His biographical entries appear in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Writers Directory, and Contemporary Author.

Subrata Dasgupta’s research from 1974 to 1991 spanned such branches of computer science as computer architecture, microprogramming, hardware description languages, program verification, and design theory. Since 1992, his work has focused on the cognitive and historical nature of creativity in the natural and artificial sciences, engineering and technology, art, literary scholarship, and cross-cultural milieux. In addition to numerous papers, essays and articles, he is the author of fourteen books.

Computer Science and the Sciences of the Artificial

Influenced by Herbert Simon’s seminal book The Sciences of the Artificial, Dasgupta has written extensively on the historical, epistemological and cognitive nature of the artificial sciences and, in particular, on computer science as a science of the artificial. His books include: The Design and Description of Computer Architectures (John Wiley, 1984), Computer Architecture: A Modern Synthesis. Volume 1: Foundations and Volume 2: Advanced Topics (John Wiley, 1989), Design Theory and Computer Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and It Began with Babbage : The Genesis of Computer Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) which was selected as an 'Outstanding Academic Title for 2014' by the journal Choice. Most recently, his Computer Science: A Very Short Introduction (2016) was published as a volume in Oxford University Press's best-selling and prestigious "Very Short Introductions" series.'

Cognitive-Historical Studies of Creativity

He has published numerous papers and essays on the cognitive-historical-biographical aspects of creativity in art, science, technology and scholarship in such print journals as Perspectives on Science, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, Creativity Research Journal, Physics News, Physics of Life Reviews and the online journal PsyArt. His books include Creativity in Invention and Design (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Technology and Creativity (Oxford University Press, 1996), Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science (Oxford University Press, 1999),

Twilight of the Bengal Renaissance: R.K. Dasgupta and His Quest for a World Mind (Dey’s Publishing, 2005), The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (Permanent Black, 2007), and Awakening: The Story of the Bengal Renaissance (Random House India, 2010).

One of his special interests is the nature of the creative mind spanning multiple cultures, especially the ‘Indo-Western mind’. His work on the 19th century creative and intellectual movement in Bengal called the Bengal Renaissance addresses this mentality.

Creative Writing

Dasgupta’s interests in cross-cultural creativity has extended to ‘creative literary writing’ of both fiction and nonfiction. He has published two novels, Three Times a Minority (Writers Workshop Calcutta, 2003), and The Golden Jubilee (Amaryllis, 2013), and a memoir of his English childhood, Salaam Stanley Matthews (Granta, 2006). He has recently completed another novel that explores cross-cultural psychology, titled Voice of the Rain Season.

Books

Personal Information

He is married to Sarmistha Dasgupta, daughter of the comparative literature scholar and intellectual historian Rabindra Kumar Das Gupta, the first director of the Indian National Library. He has two sons, Jaideep and Shome.