ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The project aims to systematically explore an entire field of current forms of theatre, which despite its outstanding cultural and political significance has so far largely been ignored by theatre studies. Over the past two decades, notwithstanding intense competition from television and electronic media, theatre has been able to reassert and even reinforce its relevance in many different parts of the world and in widely diverse cultural fields (politics, business, social work, development aid, health care, and education). This renewed relevance originates not in traditional, experimental, or commercial theatre but rather among the many different types of applied theatre, which set in motion constructive social processes while upholding theatre’s aesthetic claim. Theatre with clear social, political, or economic aims is experiencing an unprecedented boom. The study will analyse this cross-cultural trend against the background of new theories of the aesthetics of performances and rehearsal processes. This theatre studies approach promises precise insights into the aesthetic forms of applied theatre, which constitute the (hitherto barely researched) foundation of its political effects. It will furthermore bring to light the ethical issues of applied theatre: intense aesthetic experiences – often linked with risks when it comes to performances – do not readily fit in with the claim to restore children, youngsters, patients, and other target groups to health, integrity, and self-confidence through theatrical practice. The project aims to show how aesthetic, political, and ethical aspects interact in the practice of applied theatre. Investigations will focus on carefully selected case studies in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, whose comparison will make it possible for the first time to capture the worldwide landscape of applied theatre in its full diversity, but also in its overarching structures and interrelations.

2 285 295 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30

This project aims at creating a multimedia archive of the printed works of Anton Francesco Doni, who was not only an author but also a typographer, a publisher and a member of the Giolito and Marcolini’s editorial staff. The analysis of Doni’s work may be a good way to investigate appropriation, text rewriting and image reusing practices which are typical of several authors of the 16th Century, as clearly shown by the critics in the last decades. This project intends to bring to light the wide range of impulses from which Doni’s texts are generated, with a great emphasis on the figurative aspect. The encoding of these texts will be carried out using the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines, which will enable any single text to interact with a range of intertextual references both at a local level (inside the same text) and at a macrostructural level (references to other texts by Doni or to other authors). The elements that will emerge from the textual encoding concern: A) The use of images Real images: the complex relation between Doni’s writing and the xylographies available in Marcolini’s printing-house or belonging to other collections. Mental images: the remarkable presence of verbal images, as descriptions, ekphràseis, figurative visions, dreams and iconographic allusions not accompanied by illustrations, but related to a recognizable visual repertoire or to real images that will be reproduced. B) The use of sources A parallel archive of the texts most used by Doni will be created. Digital anastatic reproductions of the 16th-Century editions known by Doni will be provided whenever available. The various forms of intertextuality will be divided into the following typologies: allusions; citations; rewritings; plagiarisms; self-quotations. Finally, the different forms of narrative (tales, short stories, anecdotes, lyrics) and the different idiomatic expressions (proverbial forms and wellerisms) will also be encoded.

559 200 €

Start date: 2008-08-01, End date: 2012-07-31

"This proposal aims at strengthening the connections between more fundamentally oriented areas of mathematics like algebra, geometry, analysis, and topology, and the more applied oriented and more recently emerging disciplines of discrete mathematics, optimization, and algorithmics. The overall goal of the project is to obtain, with methods from fundamental mathematics, new effective tools to unravel the complexity of structures like graphs, networks, codes, knots, polynomials, and tensors, and to get a grip on such complex structures by new efficient characterizations, sharper bounds, and faster algorithms. In the last few years, there have been several new developments where methods from representation theory, invariant theory, algebraic geometry, measure theory, functional analysis, and topology found new applications in discrete mathematics and optimization, both theoretically and algorithmically. Among the typical application areas are networks, coding, routing, timetabling, statistical and quantum physics, and computer science. The project focuses in particular on: A. Understanding partition functions with invariant theory and algebraic geometry B. Graph limits, regularity, Hilbert spaces, and low rank approximation of polynomials C. Reducing complexity in optimization by exploiting symmetry with representation theory D. Reducing complexity in discrete optimization by homotopy and cohomology These research modules are interconnected by themes like symmetry, regularity, and complexity, and by common methods from algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology."

2 001 598 €

Start date: 2014-01-01, End date: 2018-12-31

Rates of domestic violence and the relative risk of premature death for women are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region. Yet we know remarkably little about the economic forces, incentives and constraints that drive discrimination against women in this region, making it hard to identify policy levers to address the problem. This project will help fill this gap. I will investigate gender discrimination from two complementary perspectives. First, through the lens of economic history, I will investigate the forces driving trends in women’s relative well-being since slavery. To quantify the evolution of well-being of sub-Saharan women relative to men, I will use three types of historical data: anthropometric indicators (relative height), vital statistics (to compute numbers of missing women), and outcomes of formal and informal family law disputes. I will then investigate how major economic developments and changes in family laws differentially affected women’s welfare across ethnic groups with different norms on women’s roles and rights. Second, using intra-household economic models, I will provide new insights into domestic violence and gender bias in access to crucial resources in present-day Africa. I will develop a new household model that incorporates gender identity and endogenous outside options to explore the relationship between women’s empowerment and the use of violence. Using the notion of strategic delegation, I will propose a new rationale for the separation of budgets often observed in African households and generate predictions of how improvements in women’s outside options affect welfare. Finally, with first hand data, I will investigate intra-household differences in nutrition and work effort in times of food shortage from the points of view of efficiency and equity. I will use activity trackers as an innovative means of collecting high quality data on work effort and thus overcome data limitations restricting the existing literature

1 499 313 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31