ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Ethiopia is one of the countries with the most ancient Christian history, and the only country in Africa where Christianity became official religion as early as in the 4th century A.D. It is also the only country in the region where the history has been documented in written sources: manuscripts in possession of ca. 600 monasteries and 20,000 churches, some of which date back to early Middle Ages, have been estimated to number up to ca. 200,000. Only a minor part of these archives have so far received scholarly evaluation, only less than one tenth of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitalized, and only those that have come in possession of European libraries have been duly catalogued and are well protected. A great part of this unique heritage is on the verge of extinction, and urgent action needs to be taken to save it from complete disappearance. A thorough research into the texts will grant insight into the mentality of this African region and provide parallels to the ways other African regions without ancient written tradition may have developed, as well as to the ways Christianity spread in medieval Europe: in monastic Ethiopia some features now lost in the civilized world may still be observed. The project will unite scholars working in the fields of philology, codicology, digital philology, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and book preservation, who will secure the most important pieces of historical written evidence and carry out first-hand in-depth research into the witnesses. Local history and oral traditions collected during field research will allow a comprehensive and complete evaluation of the sources. Focus on historiographic and legal documents will allow a detailed reconstruction of local history of selected regions.

1 746 080 €

Start date: 2009-12-01, End date: 2015-05-31

One of the prominent features of Medieval Aristotelianism, both Arabic and Latin, is the fact that Aristotle has been credited with writings that, albeit Neoplatonic in origin, circulated under his name. Crucial as it might be for the genesis of Arabic-Islamic philosophy, the main text of the Neoplatonic tradition into Arabic, i.e., the so-called Theology of Aristotle, is still poorly edited and no running commentary exists on it. The Theology of Aristotle, derived in reality from Plotinus' Enneads, will be critically edited, translated and commented upon. This project will also study the Graeco-Arabic translations from a linguistic viewpoint. It will develop the extant Greek and Arabic Lexicon; of the Medieval translations of philosophical works into a computational resource. For the first time, the project allows Ancient and Arabic philosophy to interact with computational linguistics.

2 106 381 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2015-03-31

Music is rapidly being transformed by digital technologies; it is in the vanguard of the changes to contemporary cultures and cultural economies afforded by digitization, and is widely seen as a test case of digitization’s effects. Yet the academic music disciplines have not responded with research on these fundamental developments. This project, by combining two innovative interdisciplinary components, aims systematically to advance the state of contemporary music research, while contributing to social and media theory. It will be the first research programme to analyse comprehensively the range of interrelated transformations in music and musical experience wrought by digital technologies. The first element of the project is a comparative programme of ethnographic studies examining transformations in creative, performance and improvisation practices, the nature of music as a cultural object, new aesthetic forms, altered modes of musical consumption and circulation, and changing industry and institutional structures. Given the ease of transnational distribution of digitized musics, research will also follow certain genres as they circulate among diasporic groups. These and related issues will be studied in five countries, each intrinsically significant as well as yielding instructive comparisons between them: the UK, Cuba, Kenya, India and Turkey. The emphasis in each ethnography will be on analyzing the embedded nature of digital musical practices in local cultural, social, economic and political conditions. Second, on the basis of this programme, the project aims to advance contemporary music research by developing an interdisciplinary theory and methodology which progresses beyond the current state of the field. Music research has been divided between disciplines such as musicology and music analysis which address the musical object and centre on art musics, and sociological and anthropological approaches which privilege music’s social, institutional and discursive forms and focus primarily on popular and vernacular musics. The present project bridges these divisions by expounding an innovative theory and methodology focused on music’s mediation, one that integrates recent elements of social, anthropological and media theory. Moreover it addresses music’s digital transformations across the spectrum of contemporary musics: art, popular and vernacular, commercial and non-commercial. Given that music’s core properties – mediation, performance, improvisation, affect, complex materialities – are also core concerns of contemporary social theory, the research will in turn contribute to ‘musicalising’ social theory. The project aims to have far-reaching impacts, creating a field of comparative studies of digital music cultures while reconfiguring the interdisciplinary foundations of music research.

1 708 075 €

Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-12-31

The aim of this project is to provide through an innovative critical edition the first comprehensive interpretation of some physical, epistemological, ethical and rhetorical works by key figures of Hellenistic philosophy like Epicurus, Chrysippus and Philodemus. These works, totally lost in the manuscript tradition, are preserved exclusively in the carbonised papyrus rolls found since 1752 at Herculaneum and are either totally unpublished or were published only partially between the XIX and the XX century. Even when they were edited, this was done with very precarious methods. In particular, the previuos editors did not usually read the original papyri themselves and even when this was the case, they could not dispose of any modern technology for doing this successfully. In order to overcome these problems the candidate plans for each work: a) to reconstruct with pioneering mathematical techniques the relative and absolute sequence of the papyrus fragments in the original bookroll; b) to read and transcribe the original text by means of last-generation fiber-optic microscopes and with the help of digital multispectral images (MSI); c) to make a thorough textual constitution with a new editorial system and a complete translation; d) to provide an extensive philosophical introduction and commentary containing a wide-ranging interpretation which highlights the specific contribution given by each work in the mainstream of the philosophical discussion of the Hellenistic age; e) to supply a DVD including an interactive edition of the critical text with direct links to all the relevant papyrological documentation (MSI, old apographs, archive documents) and a virtual reconstruction of the original papyrus roll.

900 000 €

Start date: 2009-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30