ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project has the potential to radically change current understanding of cultic and social transformation in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem (c. 6th-4th centuries BCE), an important formative phase of ancient Judaism. “BABYLON” draws on recent, ground-breaking advances in the study of cuneiform texts to illuminate the Babylonian environment of the Judean exile, the socio-historical context which gave rise to the transformative era in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, these new data show that the parallels between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization were substantially more far-reaching than presently recognized in Biblical scholarship. “BABYLON” will study the extent of these similarities and explore the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem. This goal will be achieved through four sub-projects. P1 will study the social dynamics and intellectual universe of the Babylonian priesthood. P2 will finalize the publication of cuneiform archives of Babylonian priests living in the time of the exile. P3 will identify the exact areas of change in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem. P4, the synthesis, will draw from each of these sub-projects to present a comparative study of the Second Temple and contemporary Babylonian models of cultic and social organization, and to propose a strategy of research into the possible routes of transmission between Babylonia and Jerusalem. The research will be carried out by three team members: the PI (P1 and P4), a PhD in Assyriology (P2) and a post-doctoral researcher in Biblical Studies specialized in the Second Temple period (P3 and P4). The participation of the wider academic community will be invited at two moments in the course of the project, in the form of a workshop and an international conference. “BABYLON” will adopt an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together Assyriologists and Biblical scholars for a much-needed dialogue, thereby exploding the artificial boundaries that currently exist in the academic landscape between these two fields.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2015-08-31

The aim of the proposed project is to shed light on early childhood gender-differentiated socialization and gender-specific susceptibility to parenting within families in relation to disruptive behaviour in boys and girls in the first four years of life. The popular saying boys will be boys refers to the observation that boys show more disruptive behaviours (e.g., noncompliance or aggression) than girls, a pattern that has been confirmed frequently in scientific research. There is also evidence that parents treat boys differently from girls in ways that are likely to foster boys disruptive behaviour, and that boys are more susceptible to problematic family functioning than girls. The crucial question is whether gender differences in socialization, susceptibility to socialization, and children s behavioural outcomes are also salient when the same parents are doing the parenting of both a boy and a girl. Within-family comparisons are necessary to account for structural differences between families. To this end, families with two children born 22-26 months apart will be recruited from the general population. To account for birth order and gender-combination effects, the sample includes four groups of 150 families each, with the following sibling combinations: girl-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl, and boy-boy. The study has a four-wave longitudinal design, based on the youngest sibling with assessments at ages 12, 24, 36, and 48 months, because gender differences in disruptive behaviour develop during the toddler years. Each assessment consists of two home visits: one with mother and one with father, including observations of both children and of the children separately. Parenting behaviours will be studied in reaction to specific child behaviours, including aggression, noncompliance, and prosocial behaviours.

1 611 970 €

Start date: 2010-02-01, End date: 2015-03-31

Human bodies eat. But what does this entail? The proposed project will explore how the eating body is shaped in different Western practices. These will include nutritional research and health care clinics, sites that have a far-reaching impact on how we eat. Four related sub-projects will trace the most relevant contrasts: (1) the eating body's health: limiting calorie intake versus maximising satisfaction; (2) the eating body's sensitivity: on tasting in various practices; (3) the eating body and other eaters: on different ways of relating individual and collective; (4) the eating body and its environment: on absorbing food, excreting waste and different bodily boundaries. These four sub-projects will together inform an anthropology of the eating body in Western practices. A fifth sub-project will attend to the eater in theory . Eating may be ubiquitous in practice, but it is strikingly absent from theorising in the Western philosophical tradition. This has profound implications for social science repertoires, which tend to include an actor modelled on the neuromuscular body. This actor sees, hears, moves and manipulates, but does not eat. Drawing on what we learn about the eating body in the empirical parts of the study, the fifth sub-project will model the actor on the eater. Eaters do not observe from a distance, but are mixed up with their surroundings. They do not judge impartially, but appreciate their food as they destroy it. Their metabolic activity, distributed over every cell, does not depend on central control. The theoretical possibilities that follow, will be experimentally explored. Thus the project aims to substantially enrich the Western tradition by feeding it with lessons drawn from its own marginalised experiences.

1 848 701 €

Start date: 2010-03-01, End date: 2015-02-28

Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy in the western male population and the associated socio-economic impact on healthcare is more than worrying. There is one key feature of confined (stage T2) prostate cancer that needs to be addressed with immediate urgency: its true aggressiveness. Not all cancers are life threatening and early diagnosis, although needed to improve outcome, will lead to overtreatment of patients with indolent prostate cancer resulting in unnecessary treatment-related morbidity. Therefore, methods to identify clinically significant forms of prostate cancer have to be developed. To pursue this, the initial assessment of the extent of the disease process (clinical staging) needs to be adequate. Obtaining pre-treatment representative tumor tissue (biopsies) is a major clinical challenge, as the disease is often multi-focal and heterogeneous. Accurate functional in vivo imaging modalities could guide these biopsies. Modern genomics technologies have identified numerous cancer cell-associated genetic markers being expressed in prostate cancer tissue or body fluids. Closing the gap between genomics and a non-invasive metabolic assessment of the in vivo prostate, we propose to identify new in vivo targets/biomarkers indicating confined prostate cancer aggressiveness with the underlying central hypothesis: early functional metabolic differences in different tumor foci determine whether it will grow into life-threatening prostate cancer or not. To track these early metabolic differences, the very latest magnetic resonance methodologies, including 13C MR of hyperpolarized metabolites and 1H- and 31P-MRSI of the in vivo human prostate at a field strength of 7 Tesla, will be further developed and implemented. In the well-established translational research environment at the host institution, potential new biomarkers translate into molecular diagnostics or imaging tools for an accurate individual assessment of cancer aggressiveness.

1 800 209 €

Start date: 2010-03-01, End date: 2015-02-28