From 1992 his focus has been on the cognitive historical studies of creativity and the history and philosophy of science and technology.

Volume 1: Foundations and Volume 2: Advanced Topics (John Wiley, 1989), Design Theory and Computer Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991),[4] and It Began with Babbage : The Genesis of Computer Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) [5] (selected as an 'Outstanding Academic Title for 2014' by the journal Choice), Computer Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016; a volume in OUP’s best-selling and prestigious “Very Short Introduction” series), and most recently, The Second Age of Computer Science: From Algol Genes to Neural Nets (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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), [7] 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),[8] and, most recently, A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity (Routledge 2019) and The Renaissance Considered as a Creative Phenomenon (Routledge 2022).

He has published three novels, Three Times a Minority (Writers Workshop Calcutta, 2003), The Golden Jubilee (Amaryllis, 2013), Voice of the Rain Season [9] (Fingerprint, 2018), and a memoir of his childhood in England, Salaam Stanley Matthews (Granta, 2006).

[10][11] 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.