Roland Wittje

Roland Wittje is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He studied physics and philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, and completed his PhD, on the history of physics in Norway during the interwar period, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, in 2003. After curating the exhibition Science, Music and Mass Media in the Age of Electroacoustics in Trondheim, Roland taught history of science at the University of Regensburg from 2007 to 2014. His research interests include history of the physical sciences and engineering in the nineteenth and twentieth century, scientific instruments, university collections, scientific practice, and science and engineering education. Roland has been Vice-President of Universeum, the European Association for the Preservation of University Heritage, since 2010 and coordinates the Universeum Working Group on Recent Heritage of Science. His publications include The Age of Electroacoustics (MIT Press 2016) and Learning by Doing: Instruments and Experiments in the History of Science Teaching (edited with Peter Heering; Franz Steiner 2012). He has worked extensively on of the history of modern acoustics and was a visiting scholar at the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics research group in 2015 and 2016. In his current project, Roland addresses acoustic knowledge, sound technologies, and music in early twentieth-century India.