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

AnonymClassic is the first ever comprehensive study of Kalila and Dimna (a book of wisdom in fable form), a text of premodern world literature. Its spread is comparable to that of the Bible, except that it passed from Hinduism and Buddhism via Islam to Christianity. Its Arabic version, produced in the 8th century, when this was the lingua franca of the Near East, became the source of all further translations up to the 19th century. The work’s multilingual history involving circa forty languages has never been systematically studied. The absence of available research has made world literature ignore it, while scholars of Arabic avoided it because of its widely diverging manuscripts, so that the actual shape of the Arabic key version is still in need of investigation. AnonymClassic tests a number of ‘high-risk’ propositions, including three key hypotheses: 1) The anonymous Arabic copyists of Kalila and Dimna are de facto co-authors, 2) their agency is comparable to that of the named medieval translators, and 3) the fluctuation of the Arabic versions is conditioned by the work’s fictional status. AnonymClassic’s methodology relies on a cross-lingual narratological analysis of the Arabic versions and all medieval translations (supported by a synoptic digital edition), which takes precisely the interventions at each stage of transmission (redaction, translation) as its subject. Considering the work’s paths of dissemination from India to Europe, AnonymClassic will challenge the prevalent Western theoretical lens on world literature conceived ‘from above’ with the view ‘from below,’ based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by its versions. AnonymClassic will introduce a new paradigm of an East-Western literary continuum with Arabic as a cultural bridge. Against the current background of Europe’s diversifying and multicultural society, AnonymClassic purposes to integrate pre-modern Near Eastern literature and culture into our understanding of Global Culture.

2 435 113 €

Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

Based on wide-ranging sources, the project studies artistic training in pre-modern Central Europe. Up to the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the study area experienced various sizes with changing borders and different linguistic areas and jurisdictions. The project explores these aspects, referring to current research on culture-historical geography. Moreover, it will examine and, in some cases, revise the one-sided negative image of the guilds, using the example of research into historical networks and components of the dynamism of personal associations developed by neighbouring disciplines: Guild structure is viewed at times as an all-embracing, tightly knit network that permitted artists to exchange ideas and move freely and establish art markets. The cross-border research approach thus complements for the first time the historical idea of the artist as a model in social history. Up to about 1800, the artist was part of the hierarchical European society; except for the court artist, he was an artisan bound to the guilds. Numerous attempts to institutionalise artistic training and transfer it to academies succeeded only when the guilds were dissolved under Napoleon. An edition of all German-language guild and artisan regulations in Central Europe will make a hitherto little noted source type of major relevance accessible to research. One aim is to assemble a critical corpus of historical sources structured according to cities, a second, to analyse the social historical contexts, among them, synergy effects of “artistic knowledge” and training practices, the artist’s social and territorial mobility and the gender-specific inclusions and exclusions in pre-modern workshop operations. In terms of globalisation, the project can overcome topographical, methodological and content-related borders in all directions and lay the foundation for a comprehensive analysis of all of European artistic training.

1 665 117 €

Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-05-31

BabMed represents the first ever comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of cuneiform, comprising the largest ancient collection of medical data before Hippocrates. The latest phase of Babylonian medicine, as preserved in Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, has never been systematically studied in the light of older cuneiform materials. The absence of accessible cuneiform medical literature has forced recent medical histories to bypass Babylonian medicine, while Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud has simply been ignored. BabMed tests a number of 'high risk' propositions, including two key hypotheses: 1) cuneiform survived much longer than previously suspected, and 2) Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud mostly derives from Akkadian medicine. BabMed's methodology relies upon native taxonomies rather than modern biomedical disease classifications, countering flawed retrospective diagnoses that obviate the entire history of medicine. Comparisons with neighbouring medical systems challenge the prevalent Eurocentricity of current histories, in which Greek medicine has become the standard for all ancient medicine. BabMed will introduce a new paradigm for knowledge transfer which will recognise the barriers between ancient arts of medicine and how they were overcome in antiquity. One such barrier was script and language, and BabMed proposes that Babylonian medicine survived the death of cuneiform script and was preserved in part in the local Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, a unique text which straddles the borders of Greco-Roman Palestine and Persian Babylonia and mirrors the scientific thinking of both worlds.

2 233 747 €

Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30