ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The AlchemEast project is devoted to the study of alchemical theory and practice as it appeared and developed in distinct, albeit contiguous (both chronologically and geographically) areas: Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East, from Ancient Babylonian times to the early Islamic Period. This project combines innovative textual investigations with experimental replications of ancient alchemical procedures. It uses sets of historically and philologically informed laboratory replications in order to reconstruct the actual practice of ancient alchemists, and it studies the texts and literary forms in which this practice was conceptualized and transmitted. It proposes new models for textual criticism in order to capture the fluidity of the transmission of ancient alchemical writings. AlchemEast is designed to carry out a comparative investigation of cuneiform tablets as well as a vast corpus of Greek, Syriac and Arabic writings. It will overcome the old, pejorative paradigm that dismissed ancient alchemy as a "pseudo-science", by proposing a new theoretical framework for comprehending the entirety of ancient alchemical practices and theories. Alongside established forms of scholarly output, such as critical editions of key texts, AlchemEast will provide an integrative, longue durée perspective on the many different phases of ancient alchemy. It will thus offer a radically new vision of this discipline as a dynamic and diversified art that developed across different technical and scholastic traditions. This new representation will allow us to connect ancient alchemy with medieval and early modern alchemy and thus fully reintegrate ancient alchemy in the history of pre-modern alchemy as well as in the history of ancient science more broadly.

1 997 000 €

Start date: 2017-12-01, End date: 2022-11-30

The Arctic has risen to global attention in recent years, as it has been reconfigured through debates about global environmental change, resource extraction and disputes over sovereign rights. Within these discourses, little attention has been paid to the cultures of the Arctic. Indeed, it often seems as if the Circumpolar Arctic in global public understanding remains framed as a 'natural region' - that is, a place where the environment dominates the creation of culture. This framing has consequences for the region, because through this the Arctic becomes constructed as a space where people are absent. This proposal aims to discover how and why this might be so. The proposal argues that this construction of the Arctic emerged from the exploration of the region by Europeans and North Americans and their contacts with indigenous people from the middle of the eighteenth century. Particular texts, cartographic representations and objects were collected and returned to sites like London, Copenhagen, Berlin and Philadelphia. The construction of the Arctic thereby became entwined within the growth of colonial museum cultures and, indeed, western modernity. This project aims to delineate the networks and collecting cultures involved in this creation of Arctic Cultures. It will bring repositories in colonial metropoles into dialogue with sites of collection in the Arctic by tracing the contexts of discovery and memorialisation. In doing so, it aspires to a new understanding of the consequences of certain forms of colonial representation for debates about the Circumpolar Arctic today. The project involves research by the Principal Investigator and four Post Doctoral Researchers at museums, archives, libraries and repositories across Europe and North America, as well as in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. A Project Assistant based in Oxford will help facilitate the completion of the research.

1 996 250 €

Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30

The objective of this proposal is to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia—the vast area extending from the Taklamakan desert to Northeast China. This region was the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its uniqueness was determined by complex dynamics of religious and cultural exchanges gravitating around an ancient communication artery, known as the Silk Road. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange; its transfer predetermined the transfer of adjacent aspects of culture. The religious exchange involved a variety of cultures and civilisations, which were modified and shaped by their adoption of Buddhism. This process overrode the ethnic and linguistic boundaries of the Buddhist universe. One specific aspect of this process was the rise of the local forms of Buddhism. This project intends to investigate such Buddhist localisations between the 6th–14th centuries. I will create a new trans-regional and trans-cultural vision of the religious transfer in Eastern Central Asian history and will reconstruct this Buddhist network with its entities and relations. It will incorporate the fascinating, but as yet under-researched field of Eastern Central Asian Buddhism into a broader research agenda of Comparative Religious Studies. It will establish a new research approach by bringing together many research fields and agendas (such as Philology, Art History, Archaeology, Religious Studies) into one synthesising narrative based on a unique perspective, in which, religious exchange in Eastern Central Asia will be analysed as a dynamic network emerging in its spatial and temporal aspects. For the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut, Kitan) will be explored in a systematic way.

1 998 717 €

Start date: 2017-08-01, End date: 2022-07-31

Supra-molecular protein machineries control diverse cellular processes. Knowing their structural organization is crucial for understanding their function. As classical structural biology techniques are limited in studying such assemblies in their natural cellular environment, there is a critical methodological gap inhibiting a direct link between structure and function. Consequently, the structural intermediates underlying a full activity cycle of a large multi-protein complex have been impossible to visualize. Recent advances in fluorescence microscopy, in particular the development of groundbreaking superresolution microscopy (SRM) methods, can now help bridge this gap. With this interdisciplinary proposal, my group will develop unique and innovative optical, biological and computational imaging technologies to determine the structural organization of multi-protein assemblies in their functional cellular context. We will reach this goal by developing a method to robustly measure the precise 3D arrangements of proteins in supra-molecular assemblies in situ with nanometer isotropic resolution based on supercritical-angle detection and by measuring their absolute stoichiometries with engineered counting standards. We will also develop new data analysis tools to statistically analyze such data, taking into account the functional cellular context measured with correlative superresolution and electron microscopy, multi-color SRM and molecular biology tools. We will apply these new methods to address key questions on endocytosis, a fundamental membrane trafficking process. Our aim is to determine a time-resolved 3D superresolution localization map of the yeast endocytic proteins during the major functional transitions and to integrate these data into a mechanistic model of endocytosis. Importantly, the methods we develop here can be applied to many other large protein-based machines, and thus have the potential to have high impact in other key areas of cell biology.

1 686 469 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2022-05-31