Project acronym FAMINE
Project Relocated Remembrance: the Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847-1921
Researcher (PI) Marguérite Christina Maria Corporaal
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary The Great Hunger (1845-49) radically transformed Ireland: it led to the wide-scale eviction of farmers, killed one million of the rural population, and caused massive emigration to other parts of the British Empire and the United States. Moreover, the Great Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments and its trauma is pivotal to the development of an Irish postcolonial consciousness between 1847-1921. There is a vast unexplored transatlantic corpus of prose fiction, written between the aftermath of the Famine and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which remembers the years of starvation and diaspora.
My project is the first to inventorise and bring together this under-researched body of literature, written in Ireland and by Irish immigrants in England, Canada and the United States. This fiction requires intensive examination for significant reasons, offering alternative perspectives on how the Famine was culturally experienced than previous studies have displayed, and representing subaltern voices and recollections. Moreover, the texts are written in the homeland as well as in diaspora, by migrated Irish or their descendants. An examination of the corpus will therefore move beyond the largely nation-oriented frontiers of cultural memory studies towards innovative, transnational approaches.
The project specifically investigates how remembrance is mediated through time, from one generation to another, and space, in diaspora. It aims to evolve a novel theoretical model about the interaction between temporal and spatial relocation in literary remembrance. This pioneering model will generate groundbreaking insights into the interaction between memory and ethnic identity in comparative contexts of cultural dislocation, a colonised homeland and migrant communities; and in processes of cultural relocation: de-colonisation and ethnic integration. At the same time, the project will analyse genre aspects which play a dynamic role in processes of cultural remembrance, contributing a new perspective to the interdisciplinary debate on media of recollection in cultural memory studies.
Summary
The Great Hunger (1845-49) radically transformed Ireland: it led to the wide-scale eviction of farmers, killed one million of the rural population, and caused massive emigration to other parts of the British Empire and the United States. Moreover, the Great Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments and its trauma is pivotal to the development of an Irish postcolonial consciousness between 1847-1921. There is a vast unexplored transatlantic corpus of prose fiction, written between the aftermath of the Famine and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which remembers the years of starvation and diaspora.
My project is the first to inventorise and bring together this under-researched body of literature, written in Ireland and by Irish immigrants in England, Canada and the United States. This fiction requires intensive examination for significant reasons, offering alternative perspectives on how the Famine was culturally experienced than previous studies have displayed, and representing subaltern voices and recollections. Moreover, the texts are written in the homeland as well as in diaspora, by migrated Irish or their descendants. An examination of the corpus will therefore move beyond the largely nation-oriented frontiers of cultural memory studies towards innovative, transnational approaches.
The project specifically investigates how remembrance is mediated through time, from one generation to another, and space, in diaspora. It aims to evolve a novel theoretical model about the interaction between temporal and spatial relocation in literary remembrance. This pioneering model will generate groundbreaking insights into the interaction between memory and ethnic identity in comparative contexts of cultural dislocation, a colonised homeland and migrant communities; and in processes of cultural relocation: de-colonisation and ethnic integration. At the same time, the project will analyse genre aspects which play a dynamic role in processes of cultural remembrance, contributing a new perspective to the interdisciplinary debate on media of recollection in cultural memory studies.
Max ERC Funding
741 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-09-30
Project acronym FASLW
Project FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE: The Space of Law in War
Researcher (PI) Eyal Weizman
Host Institution (HI) GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary Although violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and human right (HR) conventions are frequently undertaken in cities and by means that deliberately manipulate the elements that constitute their built fabric, this project contends that organizations of international justice could benefit from a closer engagement with the operational procedures, conceptual assumptions, methodologies, and technologies of urban and architectural analysis. Legal claims of the kind that are brought to international courts and tribunals or made to circulate within the general media often invoke images of destroyed buildings or of menacing new constructions, but these are too often merely treated as self-evident illustrations of atrocity. This project attempts to transform the built environment from an illustration of alleged violations to a source of knowledge about them and as a resource through which controversial events and processes could be reconstructed, analysed and better understood. To be undertaken at the Centre for Research Architecture, a multidisciplinary group of spatial practitioners directed by the PI, the project will employ new technologies and novel forms of spatial analysis in order to query the function of space as evidence within the different forums of international justice. The project is organized around the investigation of several legal controversies, each with a distinct spatial dimension. The project is driven by the introduction of a new operative concept Forensic Architecture (FA) which is proposed as a new field of practice and as an analytical method for probing the political and social histories inscribed in spatial artefacts and in built environments. The project will result with web-based interactive platform, an exhibition accompanied by a large edited catalogue and a symposium, and a monograph by the PI.
Summary
Although violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and human right (HR) conventions are frequently undertaken in cities and by means that deliberately manipulate the elements that constitute their built fabric, this project contends that organizations of international justice could benefit from a closer engagement with the operational procedures, conceptual assumptions, methodologies, and technologies of urban and architectural analysis. Legal claims of the kind that are brought to international courts and tribunals or made to circulate within the general media often invoke images of destroyed buildings or of menacing new constructions, but these are too often merely treated as self-evident illustrations of atrocity. This project attempts to transform the built environment from an illustration of alleged violations to a source of knowledge about them and as a resource through which controversial events and processes could be reconstructed, analysed and better understood. To be undertaken at the Centre for Research Architecture, a multidisciplinary group of spatial practitioners directed by the PI, the project will employ new technologies and novel forms of spatial analysis in order to query the function of space as evidence within the different forums of international justice. The project is organized around the investigation of several legal controversies, each with a distinct spatial dimension. The project is driven by the introduction of a new operative concept Forensic Architecture (FA) which is proposed as a new field of practice and as an analytical method for probing the political and social histories inscribed in spatial artefacts and in built environments. The project will result with web-based interactive platform, an exhibition accompanied by a large edited catalogue and a symposium, and a monograph by the PI.
Max ERC Funding
1 197 704 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-02-01, End date: 2015-01-31
Project acronym FOI
Project The formation of Islam: The view from below
Researcher (PI) Petra Marieke Sijpesteijn
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2007-StG
Summary My project is to write a history of the formation of Islam using the vastly important but largely neglected papyri from Egypt. Until the introduction of paper in the 10th C., papyrus was the Mediterranean world’s primary writing material. Thousands of papyrus documents survive, preserving a minutely detailed transcription of daily life, as well as the only contemporary records of Islam’s rise and first wave of conquests. As an historian and papyrologist, my career has been dedicated to developing the potential of this extraordinary resource. The prevailing model of Islam’s formation is based on sources composed by a literary élite some 150 years after the events they describe. The distortions this entails are especially problematic since it was in these first two centuries that Islam’s institutional, social and religious framework developed and stabilised. To form a meaningful understanding of this development requires tackling the contemporary documentary record, as preserved in the papyri. Yet the technical difficulties presented by these mostly unpublished and uncatalogued documents have largely barred their use by historians. This project is a systematic attempt to address this critical problem. The project has three stages: 1) a stocktaking of unedited Arabic, Coptic and Greek papyri; 2) the editing of a corpus of the most significant papyri; 3) the presentation of a synthetic historical analysis through scholarly publications and a dedicated website. By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character and ambition of Muslim state competency at the time of the Islamic conquest; the steps – military, administrative and religious – by which it extended its reach and what this tells us about the origins and evolution of Muslim ideas of rulership, religion and pow
Summary
My project is to write a history of the formation of Islam using the vastly important but largely neglected papyri from Egypt. Until the introduction of paper in the 10th C., papyrus was the Mediterranean world’s primary writing material. Thousands of papyrus documents survive, preserving a minutely detailed transcription of daily life, as well as the only contemporary records of Islam’s rise and first wave of conquests. As an historian and papyrologist, my career has been dedicated to developing the potential of this extraordinary resource. The prevailing model of Islam’s formation is based on sources composed by a literary élite some 150 years after the events they describe. The distortions this entails are especially problematic since it was in these first two centuries that Islam’s institutional, social and religious framework developed and stabilised. To form a meaningful understanding of this development requires tackling the contemporary documentary record, as preserved in the papyri. Yet the technical difficulties presented by these mostly unpublished and uncatalogued documents have largely barred their use by historians. This project is a systematic attempt to address this critical problem. The project has three stages: 1) a stocktaking of unedited Arabic, Coptic and Greek papyri; 2) the editing of a corpus of the most significant papyri; 3) the presentation of a synthetic historical analysis through scholarly publications and a dedicated website. By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character and ambition of Muslim state competency at the time of the Islamic conquest; the steps – military, administrative and religious – by which it extended its reach and what this tells us about the origins and evolution of Muslim ideas of rulership, religion and pow
Max ERC Funding
1 000 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2009-03-01, End date: 2015-02-28
Project acronym MUSTECIO
Project Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the eastern Indian Ocean
Researcher (PI) Katherine Ruth Schofield
Host Institution (HI) KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary MUSTECIO's aim is to produce, for the first time, a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in the eastern Indian Ocean. It will focus on India and the Malay peninsula, largely during the period of British expansion, c.1750-1900, and combine research methodologies from both history and ethnomusicology. Previous scholarship has argued that colonialism created a rupture with past systems of knowledge in colonised musical fields. We will seek to show that the story is more complex: although musical fields did undergo large-scale changes, the continuity of pre-colonial systems alongside these changes suggests gradual transformation, not radical disjuncture. Colonial infrastructures in the eastern Indian Ocean did not, in other words, wholly displace the long-standing networks that preceded them, and even facilitated new exchanges of indigenous cultural capital that were otherwise unmediated by the colonising powers. The process we will map entails overlapping but chronologically staggered layerings of pre-colonial, colonial and hybrid discourses, undertaken in several language-cultures and by different constituencies over time. We will also suggest that viewing India and the Malay peninsula as a single, multiply-connected region (and not as separate cultural arenas as is still paradigmatic in ethnomusicology) throws substantial and unexpected light on these patterns of transition. Finally, we will suggest that the best way to map these patterns of transition is to bring pre-colonial and colonial musical pasts, and multiple indigenous- and European-language archives, into sustained critical dialogue. By doing this on an unprecedented scale, MUSTECIO will seek to develop a new historical model for the interactions of music and colonialism: one that will persuasively account for both continuities and transformations in musical knowledge systems in the eastern Indian ocean.
Summary
MUSTECIO's aim is to produce, for the first time, a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in the eastern Indian Ocean. It will focus on India and the Malay peninsula, largely during the period of British expansion, c.1750-1900, and combine research methodologies from both history and ethnomusicology. Previous scholarship has argued that colonialism created a rupture with past systems of knowledge in colonised musical fields. We will seek to show that the story is more complex: although musical fields did undergo large-scale changes, the continuity of pre-colonial systems alongside these changes suggests gradual transformation, not radical disjuncture. Colonial infrastructures in the eastern Indian Ocean did not, in other words, wholly displace the long-standing networks that preceded them, and even facilitated new exchanges of indigenous cultural capital that were otherwise unmediated by the colonising powers. The process we will map entails overlapping but chronologically staggered layerings of pre-colonial, colonial and hybrid discourses, undertaken in several language-cultures and by different constituencies over time. We will also suggest that viewing India and the Malay peninsula as a single, multiply-connected region (and not as separate cultural arenas as is still paradigmatic in ethnomusicology) throws substantial and unexpected light on these patterns of transition. Finally, we will suggest that the best way to map these patterns of transition is to bring pre-colonial and colonial musical pasts, and multiple indigenous- and European-language archives, into sustained critical dialogue. By doing this on an unprecedented scale, MUSTECIO will seek to develop a new historical model for the interactions of music and colonialism: one that will persuasively account for both continuities and transformations in musical knowledge systems in the eastern Indian ocean.
Max ERC Funding
1 181 555 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31
Project acronym SEALINKS
Project Bridging continents across the sea: Multi-disciplinary perspectives on the emergence of long-distance maritime contacts in prehistory
Researcher (PI) Nicole Boivin
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2007-StG
Summary The role of the sea in drawing together peoples and cultures from distant places and continents in the historical period is readily apparent from textual sources and archaeological remains. In particular, and in contrast to the Atlantic, for example, which has served as a formidable natural barrier to east-west movement and migration, both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean have served as important zones of interaction and trade, across which populations have migrated and mixed for at least several thousand years. Recent research findings, including those from the applicant’s archaeological field project in south India, suggest that long-distance maritime activities in this region actually have quite precocious beginnings, and that important species and population transfers across the Indian Ocean probably began to occur well before the historical period. Such findings are perhaps not surprising in light of the evidence for human maritime activity dating back to the colonisation of Australia around 45,000 years ago, but they do suggest that the much more apparent historical evidence for maritime activity has biased maritime research in favour of later periods. This project will accordingly focus on the study of prehistoric maritime activity, and exploration of the specific developments that resulted in the transition from occasional seagoing to regular seafaring and then planned, long-distance voyaging. To do so, it will draw not only upon the traditional disciplines of archaeology and historical linguistics, but also the powerful new methods of molecular genetics, cladistics, and palaeoenvironmental studies. Such research is important not only for its value to researchers trying to reconstruct the histories of human populations, domesticated plants and animals, technologies and societies, but also for its potentially important role in highlighting for the wider public the cultural exchanges and ethnic mixing that have long characterised human societies.
Summary
The role of the sea in drawing together peoples and cultures from distant places and continents in the historical period is readily apparent from textual sources and archaeological remains. In particular, and in contrast to the Atlantic, for example, which has served as a formidable natural barrier to east-west movement and migration, both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean have served as important zones of interaction and trade, across which populations have migrated and mixed for at least several thousand years. Recent research findings, including those from the applicant’s archaeological field project in south India, suggest that long-distance maritime activities in this region actually have quite precocious beginnings, and that important species and population transfers across the Indian Ocean probably began to occur well before the historical period. Such findings are perhaps not surprising in light of the evidence for human maritime activity dating back to the colonisation of Australia around 45,000 years ago, but they do suggest that the much more apparent historical evidence for maritime activity has biased maritime research in favour of later periods. This project will accordingly focus on the study of prehistoric maritime activity, and exploration of the specific developments that resulted in the transition from occasional seagoing to regular seafaring and then planned, long-distance voyaging. To do so, it will draw not only upon the traditional disciplines of archaeology and historical linguistics, but also the powerful new methods of molecular genetics, cladistics, and palaeoenvironmental studies. Such research is important not only for its value to researchers trying to reconstruct the histories of human populations, domesticated plants and animals, technologies and societies, but also for its potentially important role in highlighting for the wider public the cultural exchanges and ethnic mixing that have long characterised human societies.
Max ERC Funding
1 200 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2008-11-01, End date: 2014-10-31
Project acronym SV-RT
Project Sastravid - a new paradigm for the study of Indian philosophical texts
Researcher (PI) Jan Westerhoff
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary The aim of the present project is to transform the way Indian philosophical texts are currently studied. To do this we provide a philosophical analysis of a set of central works from the Indian tradition, a set well known for its demanding content and the conceptual complexity of the arguments it contains. This analysis will incorporate a set of cutting-edge methodological principles, the most important of which is the intricate interlinking of conceptual analysis and its textual basis. These principles will be encoded in a web-based electronic tool that will be developed during the course of the project. This tool, called Sastravid, incorporates an example of the new research paradigm and at the same time facilitates further academic research based on the same approach. Its aim is to provide a key that unlocks the contents of Indian philosophical texts by bringing together the information contained in commentarial works, both ancient and modern, in a way that makes it easily accessible from the text itself. Apart from structuring the works, providing commentarial background and linking texts to other texts the present project develops a radically new way of analyzing the text's conceptual contents. This analysis is linked directly to the texts themselves, which makes it easy to switch between philological and philosophical modes of research. This linkage between conceptual and textual analysis embodies a radically new way of thinking about Indian philosophical texts that is located at the very frontier of the discipline and has never been applied to the study of philosophical texts before. It pushes the study of Indian philosophical works beyond the domain of mere textual scholarship into the emerging field of research studying Indian philosophy as philosophy.
Summary
The aim of the present project is to transform the way Indian philosophical texts are currently studied. To do this we provide a philosophical analysis of a set of central works from the Indian tradition, a set well known for its demanding content and the conceptual complexity of the arguments it contains. This analysis will incorporate a set of cutting-edge methodological principles, the most important of which is the intricate interlinking of conceptual analysis and its textual basis. These principles will be encoded in a web-based electronic tool that will be developed during the course of the project. This tool, called Sastravid, incorporates an example of the new research paradigm and at the same time facilitates further academic research based on the same approach. Its aim is to provide a key that unlocks the contents of Indian philosophical texts by bringing together the information contained in commentarial works, both ancient and modern, in a way that makes it easily accessible from the text itself. Apart from structuring the works, providing commentarial background and linking texts to other texts the present project develops a radically new way of analyzing the text's conceptual contents. This analysis is linked directly to the texts themselves, which makes it easy to switch between philological and philosophical modes of research. This linkage between conceptual and textual analysis embodies a radically new way of thinking about Indian philosophical texts that is located at the very frontier of the discipline and has never been applied to the study of philosophical texts before. It pushes the study of Indian philosophical works beyond the domain of mere textual scholarship into the emerging field of research studying Indian philosophy as philosophy.
Max ERC Funding
736 783 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-04-30
