ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

When new political elites and social structures emerge out of a historical rupture, how are art and architecture affected? In 1918 the political map of central Europe was redrawn as a result of the collapse of Austria-Hungary, marking a new era for the region. Through comparative analysis of the visual arts in 3 states built on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire (Austria, Hungary and [former] Czechoslovakia), this project examines how such political discontinuity affected art and architecture between 1918 and 1939. The project is organised into 4 themes, each resulting in a monograph: 1. Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde 2. Presenting the state: world fairs and exhibitionary cultures 3. Piety, reaction and renewal 4. Contested histories: monuments, memory and representations of the historical past It is the first systematic and comprehensive trans-national study of this type, based on the claim that the successor states to Austria-Hungary belonged to a common cultural space informed by the shared memory of the long years of Habsburg society and culture. The project focuses on the contradictory ways that visual arts of artists and architects in central Europe adapted to and tried to shape new socio-political circumstances in the light of the past. The project thus examines the long shadow of the Habsburg Empire over the art and culture of the twentieth century. The project also considers the impact of the political and ideological imperatives of the three successor states on the visual arts; how did governments treat the past? Did they encourage a sense of historical caesura or look to the past for legitimation? How did artists and architects respond to such new impulses? In answering these questions the project analyses the conflicts between avant-gardes and more conservative artistic movements; the role of the visual arts in interwar memory politics; the place of art in the nexus of religion, national and state identity.

2 468 359 €

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

The study will examine one of the most fundamental, yet poorly understood patterns of global biodiversity distribution: How can so many species coexist in a tropical forest? This key question of current ecology will be studied using quantitative surveys of plant-herbivore-parasitoid food webs within paired sets of tropical and temperate forests from six continents, in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Gabon, Panama, the Czech Republic, Japan, and USA, sampled using canopy cranes, truck-mounted elevated platforms and forest felling. This novel type of data will be analysed using a new rarefaction method, developed to test mechanistic explanations for biodiversity patterns along ecological gradients. It will evaluate competing hypotheses explaining latitudinal trends in insect herbivore diversity by the variation in either phylogenetic or functional diversity of plants, the host specificity of herbivores, or the diversity and specificity of their parasitoids and predators. The study will thus examine the importance of bottom-up (plants) and top-down (enemies) drivers of latitudinal trends in herbivore food webs, central to ecological theory that postulates the role of specialized herbivores as density-dependent agents of mortality involved in maintaining high tropical plant diversity. The project builds upon prior research that produced one of the largest tropical food web data sets to expand it conceptually, methodologically and geographically. It will build a globally important research facility (a canopy crane in PNG) and link researchers and infrastructure from several countries in a major effort to draw together separate lines of tropical and temperate research. Study sites in the ILTER, NEON, CTFS/SIGEO, and Canopy Crane Network will participate. The internationally recognized paraecologist program will be expanded, PhD students from both European and developing countries will be trained, and conservation of rainforests by indigenous rainforest dwellers will be leveraged.

3 349 618 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2020-09-30

"We will study fundamental problems in complexity theory using means developed in logic, specifically, in the filed of proof complexity. Since these problems seem extremely difficult and little progress has been achieved in solving them, we will prove results that will explain why they are so difficult and in which direction theory should be developed. Our aim is to develop a system of conjectures based on the concepts of feasible incompleteness and pseudorandomness. Feasible incompleteness refers to conjectures about unprovability of statements concerning low complexity computations and about lengths of proofs of finite consistency statements. Essentially, they say that incompleteness in the finite domain behaves in a similar way as in the infinite. Several conjectures of this kind have been already stated. They have strong consequences concerning separation of complexity classes, but only a few special cases have been proved. We want to develop a unified system which will also include conjectures connecting feasible incompleteness with pseudorandomness. A major part of our work will concern proving special cases and relativized versions of these conjectures in order to provide evidence for their truth. We believe that the essence of the fundamental problems in complexity theory is logical, and thus developing theory in the way described above will eventually lead to their solution."

1 259 596 €

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