ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

From medieval times, Arabic as well as European music was analysed in terms that were inherited from Classical Antiquity and had thus developed in a very different music culture. In spite of recent breakthroughs in the understanding of the latter, whose technicalities we access not only through texts and iconography, but also through instrument finds and surviving notated melodies, its relation to music traditions known from later periods and different places is almost uncharted territory. The present project explores relations between Hellenic/Hellenistic music as pervaded the theatres and concert halls throughout and beyond the Roman empire, Near Eastern traditions – from the diatonic system emerging from cuneiform sources to the flourishing musical world of the caliphates – and, as far as possible, African musical life south of Egypt as well – a region that maintained close ties both with the Hellenised culture of its northern neighbours and with the Arabian Peninsula. On the one hand, this demands collaboration between Classical Philology and Arabic Studies, extending methods recently developed within music archaeological research related to the Classical Mediterranean. Arabic writings need to be examined in close reading, using recent insights into the interplay between ancient music theory and practice, in order to segregate the influence of Greek thinking from ideas and facts that must relate to contemporaneous ‘Arabic’ music-making. In this way we hope better to define the relation of this tradition to the ‘Classical world’, potentially breaking free of Orientalising bias informing modern views. On the other hand, the study and reconstruction, virtual and material, of wind instruments of Hellenistic pedigree but found outside the confinements of the Hellenistic ‘heartlands’ may provide evidence of ‘foreign’ tonality employed in those regions – specifically the royal city of Meroë in modern Sudan and the Oxus Temple in modern Tajikistan.

775 959 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

This project will investigate the interface between the study of the bible and the study of antiquity in the nineteenth century. These two areas -- the bible and classics -- are central to the intellectual world of the 19th century, a source of knowledge, contention, and authority both as discrete topics, and, more importantly, in relation to and in competition with one another. It is impossible to understand Victorian society without appreciating the intellectual, social and institutional force of these concerns with the past. Yet modern disciplinary formation has not only separated them in the academy, but also marginalized both subject areas -- which has deeply attenuated comprehension of this foundational era. Our project will bring together scholars working on a range of fields including classics, history of education, cultural history, art history, literary history to bring back into view a fundamental but deeply misunderstood and underexplored aspect of the nineteenth century, which continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary world.

2 497 046 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2017-05-31

We aim to develop and apply a suite of new technologies in a novel cancer discovery platform that will link high-definition cancer biology, via state-of-the-art disease imaging and pathway modelling, with development of novel interrogative and therapeutic interventions to test in models of cancer that closely resemble human disease. The work will lead to a new understanding of cancer invasion, how to treat advanced disease in the metastatic niche, how to monitor therapeutic responses and the compensatory mechanisms that cause acquired resistance. Platform development will be based on combined, cross-informing technologies that will enable us to predict optimal ‘maintenance therapies’ for metastatic disease by targeting cancer evolution and spread through combination therapy. A key strand of the platform is the development of quantitative multi-modal imaging in vivo by use of optical window technology to inform detailed understanding of disease and drug mechanisms and predictive capability of pathway biomarkers. Innovative methodologies are urgently needed to address declining approval rates of novel medicines and the unmet clinical needs of treating cancer patients in the advanced disease setting, where tumour spread and survival generally continues unchecked by current therapies. This work will be largely pre-clinical, but will always be mindful of the clinical problem in managing late stage human disease through rationale design of combination therapies with companion diagnostic tests. The cancer survival statistics will be changed if we can curb continuing spread of aggressive, metastatic disease and resistance to therapy by taking smarter combined approaches that make best use of emerging technologies in an innovative way, particularly where they are more predictive of clinical efficacy.

2 499 000 €

Start date: 2012-08-01, End date: 2017-07-31

Maps have changed and with that our sense of space and spatial awareness. The key objective of this research programme is to develop a framework for the conceptualization of digital maps as new techno-cultural phenomena. Digital maps allow a greater degree of interaction between users and mapping interfaces than analogue maps do. Instead of just reading maps, users have far more influence on how maps look. Whether a navigation device that adjusts its route-display according to where the driver chooses to go, or a map in a computer-game that is partly created by players, maps have become more interactive and are now co-produced by their users. With this ERC starting grant I propose to build up a new research programme to investigate what this shift entails. I will do so by conducting a comparative analysis of a broad spectrum of digital mapping devices: in relation to (a) each other, (b) traditional cartography and (c) to other media forms that are concerned with mapping and navigation. This research programme will yield new results on how digital maps can be simultaneously understood as new media, technologies and cartographies by using a unique combination of perspectives from New Media Studies, Science and Technologies Studies. It will also contribute to a recently emerging discussion in which new media are conceived as material cultures that are physically embedded in daily life, countering conventional views of them as just new, virtual and ‘out there’. Digital maps underscore all the main assertions that figure in this recent ‘material turn’ at once: they remediate existing spaces, they merge virtual and physical spaces and are locally used and appropriated yet at the same time products of a global culture. This study will thus break new ground by offering New Media Studies innovative ways for understanding materiality, spatiality and technology.

1 422 453 €

Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2016-10-31