The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is excited to welcome Adrija Roychowdhury as Journalist in Residence from April to May 2026!

Adrija Roychowdhury is a journalist and author based in New Delhi, India. She heads the Research vertical at The Indian Express, one of the largest and most prestigious English dailies in India. Her work lies at the intersection of history, science, archaeology, and politics. She has written extensively on the assumed objectivity of scientific methods and has examined the impact of scientific principles, policies, and discoveries on people’s lives.

In 2023, for instance, she reported from Keeladi, a hamlet in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu that has drawn attention for archaeological excavations pushing back the dates of civilization in the region by several centuries. Her essay from Keeladi examined the extent to which regional and language politics influence the interpretation of archaeological artefacts.

Her other work includes reporting on attempts to decipher the script of the Indus Valley Civilization, the impact of heritage conservation principles on residents of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the politically driven linkages between archaeology and mythology projected at a sixteenth-century monument in New Delhi.

For her first book, Delhi, in Thy Name (Rupa, 2021), she studied the science and sociology of toponyms, drawing on oral history to narrate the story of place names in India’s national capital. She is currently working on her second book with archival records to document the lesser-known history of the women’s suffrage movement in India.

At the MPIWG, she will be based in the Department “Artifacts, Action, Knowledge.” Her project, “Encoding Ancient History: The Curious Case of Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Indus Script,” examines the deployment of mathematical sciences in attempts to decipher the script of the Indus Valley Civilization. The project studies how interpretations of ancient history are shaped in the present through the language of mathematics, and how reconstructions of the past inform contemporary understandings of science.