ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Early Medieval Irish literature (7th–10th centuries) is vast in extent and rich in genres, but owing to its mostly anonymous transmission, for most texts the precise time and circumstances of composition are unknown. Unless where texts contain historical references, the only clues for a rough chronological positioning of the texts are to be found in their linguistic peculiarities. Phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon of the Irish language changed considerably from Early Old Irish (7th c.) into Middle Irish (c. 10th–12th centuries). However, only the relative sequence of changes is well understood; for most sound changes very few narrow dates have been proposed so far. It is the aim of Chronologicon Hibernicum to find a common solution for both problems: through the linguistic profiling of externally dated texts (esp. annalistic writing and sources with a clear historical anchorage) and through serialising the emerging linguistic and chronological data, progress will be made in assigning dates to the linguistic changes. Groundbreakingly, this will be done by using statistical methods for the seriation of the data, and for estimating dates using Bayesian inference. The resultant information will then be used to find new dates for hitherto undated texts. On this basis, a much tighter chronological framework for the developments of the Early Medieval Irish language will be created. In a further step it will be possible to arrive at a better chronological description of medieval Irish literature as a whole, which will have repercussions on the study of the history and cultural and intellectual environment of medieval Ireland and on its connections with the wider world. The data collected and analysed in this project will form the database Chronologicon Hibernicum which will serve as the authoritative guideline and reference point for the linguistic dating of Irish texts. In the future, the methodology will be transferable to other languages.

1 804 230 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

CULTIVATE MSS aims to assess the significance of the trade in medieval manuscripts for the development of ideas about the nature and value of European culture in the early 20th century, a crucial period for the development of modern European nation states. Although recent technological developments have facilitated quantitative analyses of provenance data, charting in increasing detail the early-20th-century movement of manuscripts, including an exodus of works to America, qualitative analyses have failed to keep pace, leaving questions of how and why particular books were valued underexplored. The PI’s role in the development of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, which has begun to make available historic data about books, has revealed the need for a reassessment of the relationship between collecting and scholarship, and the potential for existing data about the manuscript trade to be used, with unpublished archival sources, to identify and compare the economic and philosophical values projected onto books. Thus the project uses the PI’s expertise to develop a multi-disciplinary approach to assess the roles of collectors, scholars and dealers in the formation of collections of medieval manuscripts, and the impact of this on scholarship, comparing the English-speaking world, France and Germany. It will analyse published and unpublished accounts of manuscripts, together with price data, to reconstruct values projected onto books. It will seek to contextualise these values within the history of the early 20th century, assessing the impact of two world wars and other political and economic shifts on the trade in books and attitudes to manuscripts as objects of national significance. The Middle Ages are often identified with the emergence of European cultural identities, thus a reappraisal of the historiography of the study of medieval manuscripts has the potential to impact research about attitudes to European culture and identity in a wide range of disciplines.

1 832 711 €

Start date: 2019-05-01, End date: 2024-04-30

This proposal seeks support for a research group led by James Heckman of the Geary Institute at University College Dublin to produce an integrated developmental approach to health that studies the origins and the evolution of health inequalities over the lifecourse and across generations, and the role played by cognition, personality, genes, and environments. Major experimental and nonexperimental international datasets will be analyzed. A practical guide to implementing related policy will be produced. We will build a science of human development that draws on, extends, and unites research on the biology and epidemiology of health disparities with medical economics and the economics of skill formation. The goal is to develop an integrated framework to jointly model the economic, social and biological mechanisms that produce the evolution and the intergenerational transmission of health and of the capabilities that foster health. The following tasks will be undertaken: (1) We will quantify the importance of early-life conditions in explaining the existence of health disparities across the lifecourse. (2) We will understand how health inequalities are transmitted across generations. (3) We will assess the health benefits from early childhood interventions. (4) We will examine the role of genes and environments in the aetiology and evolution of disease. (5) We will analyze how health inequalities emerge and evolve across the lifecourse. (6) We will give biological foundations to both our models and the health measures we will use. The proposed research will investigate causal channels for promoting health. It will compare the relative effectiveness of interventions at various stages of the life cycle and the benefits and costs of later remediation if early adversity is not adequately eliminated. It will guide the design of current and prospective experimental and longitudinal studies and policy formulation, and will train young scholars in frontier methods of research

2 505 222 €

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2016-04-30

‘Almost three centuries later, it is past time to rethink Montesquieu’s holy trinity’ (Ackerman, 2010). As Ackerman (and many others) have observed, political reality has long left the traditional model of the separation of powers behind. The problems posed by this gap between constitutional theory and political practice have recently acquired fresh urgency as developments in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, the UK, US, Bolivia and elsewhere place the separation of powers under strain. These include the emergence of authoritarian leaders; personalisation of political authority; recourse to non-legal plebiscites; and the capture or de-legitimisation of other constitutional bodies. This project argues that these difficulties are rooted in a deeper problem with constitutional thinking about institutional power: a constitution-as-law approach that equates the conferral of legal power with the authority to exercise it. This makes it possible for a gap to emerge between legal accounts of authority and its diverse –and potentially conflicting (Cotterrell)– sociological foundations. Where that gap exists, the practical authority of an institution (or constitution) may be vulnerable to challenge from rival and more socially-resonant claims (Scheppele (2017)). It is this gap between legal norms and social facts that the project aims to investigate – and ultimately bridge. How is authority established? How is it maintained? How might it fail? And how does the constitution (as rule? representation (Saward)? mission statement (King)?) shape, re-shape and come to be shaped by those processes? By investigating these questions across six case studies, the project will produce a multi-dimensional account of institutional authority that takes seriously the sociological influence of both law and culture. The results from these cases provide the evidential foundation for the project’s final outputs: a new model and new evaluative measures of the separation of powers.

1 997 628 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31

How do human infants develop complex cognition? We propose that artificial intelligence (AI) provides crucial insight into human curiosity-driven learning and the development of infant cognition. Deep learning—a technology that has revolutionised AI—involves the acquisition of informative internal representations through pre-training, as a critical precursory step to learning any specific task. We propose that, similarly, curiosity guides human infants to develop ‘hidden’ mature mental representations through pre-training well before the manifestation of behaviour. To test this proposal, for the first time we will use neuroimaging to measure the hidden changes in representations during infancy and compare these to predictions from deep learning in machines. Research Question 1 will ask how infants guide pre-training through directed curiosity, by testing quantitative models of curiosity adapted from developmental robotics. We will also test the hypothesis from pilot data that the fronto-parietal brain network guides curiosity from the start. Research Question 2 will further test the parallel with deep learning by characterising the developing infant’s mental representations within the visual system using the powerful neuroimaging technique of representational similarity analysis. Research Question 3 will investigate how individual differences in curiosity affect later cognitive performance, and test the prediction from deep learning that the effects of early experience during pre-training grow rather than shrink with subsequent experience. Finally, Research Question 4 will test the novel prediction from deep learning that, following perinatal brain injury, pre-training creates resilience provided that curiosity is intact. The investigations will answer the overarching question of how pre-training learning lays the foundations for cognition and pioneer the new field of Computational Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

This project concerns the creative agency of religious minorities in the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe societies in the 20th century. It constitutes the first comparative research on the secret police archives in the region from the perspective of the history and anthropology of religion and offers a radical perspectival shift on the value and uses of the secret police archives away from questions of justice and truth to questions of creative agency and cultural patrimony. Interdisciplinary in nature it combines archival, anthropological and cultural studies approaches to provide a re-examination and re-contextualization of the holdings of secret police archives in three states; Romania, Moldova and Hungary. The secret police archives, in addition to containing millions of files on individuals monitored by the state, also constitute a hidden repository of confiscated religious art and publications of religious minorities that were persecuted in the 20th century under fascism and communism. The investigation of these materials will be complemented by ethnographic research and the impact of the research will be extended through a public exhibition of previously hidden materials. The project has three principal stages: 1) copy/retrieve and catalogue examples of this creative material from the archives; 2) engage in ethnographic research with the communities that produced this material in order to explore the meaning and power of these artistic creations at the time of their production and in the context of post-socialism; 3) curate and stage a touring exhibition that re-presents the narratives and experiences of religious groups through their own artistic creations in order to conduct research in real time on questions of religious pluralism and intolerance in contemporary society. Through these three steps, this project will shed fresh light on the role that minority religious groups played in challenging the hegemonic order and in extending pluralism.

990 087 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

Schizophrenia, affecting 0.5-1% of the population, is ranked by the World Health Organisation as more disabling than paraplegia or blindness in 18-34 year olds. Current treatments, developed over 50 years ago, are only partly effective in treating this disability, and new treatments are lacking. To address this treatment impasse, this project aims to develop and test a novel immune based model of deficits in social cognition – the set of mental operations that underlie social interactions (e.g. emotion recognition, theory of mind) and strongly predict social disability in schizophrenia. Based on recent discoveries in schizophrenia genetics, this project asks: (1) are genetic causes of deficits in social cognition mediated by effects on immune function during development and (2) does early social environment moderate these effects? To address these questions, the project has two parts. Part A focuses on neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of social cognition in patients and healthy adults so as to (1) provide an innovative characterisation of the effects of inflammatory markers (e.g. pro-/anti- inflammatory cytokines) on social cognition, (2) establish whether these markers mediate the effects of recently identified genetic risk loci on schizophrenia, and (3) identify to what extent early social environment (e.g. parental relationships, childhood trauma) moderates this relationship. Part B focuses on behavioural and pharmacological studies in mice to (1) establish the causal effects of early immune challenge and early social environment on social cognition, and (2) test the translational benefits of anti-inflammatory treatment to normalize the resulting deficits. By validating an immune based model of schizophrenia, this project has the potential to move beyond current (dopamine based) treatments, and suggest groundbreaking alternatives for understanding and treating social disability in this and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

1 477 622 €

Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30

The purpose of the proposed project is to think afresh about the violent aftermath of the Great War and its legacies. This will be achieved by forging a team of researchers who focus on the violent conflicts that erupted in many of the former combatant states after 1917/18 from a comparative or transnational global perspective and the ways in which these conflicts were avoided in other areas. The project will differ from previous attempts to analyse the violent transition from war to peace in this period in several ways: The first is its comparative and transational complexion. Despite recent attempts to write transnational histories of the Great War, the global history of its immediate aftermath is yet to be written. War and the politics of conflicts (and its aftermaths) are still largely studied according to divisions of national identity or ethnic difference. And yet clearly the First World War was a phenomenon that crossed frontiers and left legacies that posessed common themes. Indeed one of its consequences, especially in East-Central Europe but also in the shatter-zones of the Ottoman Empire and colonial contexts, was the destruction of frontiers, creating spaces without order or unquestioned government authority. The project will thus approach its subject matter by zones of victory, of defeat, and of mutilated or ambivalent victories rather than nation-states as a novel way of overcoming nation-centric frameworks of analysis. In terms of chronological scope, the investigation moves away from the traditional emphasis on the years 1914-18 as the crucible years of twentieth-century history. Furthermore, the project is at once European and global, investigating the emergence of violent conflicts in both the shatter-zones of European land empires and colonial conflicts.

1 199 386 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2014-02-28

MISFIRES opens up new theoretical and empirical horizons for analysing and innovating ‘concerned markets’, where multiple actors’ interests, values and concerns clash. It asks how actors can engage with a market’s failures to challenge its organisation and make it more collaborative, more open to civic values and to social or political concerns. Concerned markets are contested by diverse actors with equally diverse perspectives and value measures. Evaluating such a market’s efficiency is as much of an illusion as redesigning its inner workings on a blackboard. We need new conceptual frameworks to understand how to innovate concerned markets from the inside to make them ‘better’ (as defined by concerned actors), and we urgently need empirical insights into how collaborative action in markets with such social and political stakes may translate into market change. MISFIRES relies on science and technology studies, pragmatic sociology and critical market studies to shift thinking around market organisation from failure and design to collaboration and experimentation. I devise an ethnographic and participatory inquiry to explore how a market’s failures can lead us to markets that are more attentive to and accommodating of the concerns they create. I choose three exemplary contested markets in healthcare (licensing of antiretroviral drugs, Hepatitis C pricing, and the sale of DNA information) and two emergent controversies to investigate the activities concerned actors undertake, and the instruments and devices they experiment with, to re-organise that market. MISFIRES will comprehensively map, engage in, and conceptualise this collaborative turn in organising markets. With this, MISFIRES will guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing how: 1) concerned actors voice and mobilise around the notion that a market has ‘failed’ them; 2) concerned actors seek to negotiate and address market failures; 3) this process may lead to ‘better’ markets.

1 923 780 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31

How are European workplaces being transformed? What kinds of new social bargains are emerging across the European Union? How are they being institutionalised? How are new workplace bargains shaped by the broader politics of sectors, regions and national economies? These questions are crucial to the future of the European ‘social model’. The objective of this research programme is to provide answers to these questions, drawing on cross-national survey research on workplace organisation from 1995 to 2010 and selected industrial case studies in the small open European economies of Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands. These questions also raise crucial theoretical issues. The research reformulates the core elements of the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ framework that has dominated comparative political economy for the past decade (Hall and Soskice, 2001). It improves our understanding of the diverse organisation of capitalism in Europe, of how that diversity is rooted in politically constructed ‘pathways to the future’, and of how capitalism is constructed out of social and institutional capabilities across Europe.

1 320 020 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2017-06-30

This research proposal focuses on the open quantum system dynamics of disordered and interacting many- body systems coupled to external baths. The dynamics of systems which contain both disorder and interactions are currently under intense theoretical investigation in condensed matter physics due to the discovery of a new phase of matter known as many-body localization. With the experimental realization of such systems in mind, this proposal addresses an essential issue which is to understand how coupling to external degrees of freedom influences dynamics. These systems are intrinsically complex and lie beyond the unitary closed system paradigm, so the research proposed here contains interdisciplinary methodology beyond the mainstream in condensed matter physics ranging from quantum information to quantum optics. The project has three principal objectives each of which would represent a major contribution to the field: O1. To describe the dynamics of a interacting, disordered many-body systems when coupled to external baths. O2. To perform a full characterization of spin and energy transport in their non-equilibrium steady state. O3. To explore the system capabilities as steady state thermal machine from a systematic microscopic perspective. This will be the first comprehensive study of the open system phenomenology of disordered interacting many-body systems. It will also allow for the systematic study of energy and spin transport and the exploration of the potential of these systems as steady state thermal machines. In order to successfully carry out the work proposed here, the applicant will build a world class team at Trinity College Dublin. Due to his track record and interdisciplinary background in many-body physics, quantum information and statistical mechanics combined with his personal drive and ambition the applicant is in a formidable position to successfully undertake this task with the platform provided by this ERC Starting Grant.

1 333 325 €

Start date: 2018-07-01, End date: 2023-06-30

Predicting the electron and spin transport properties of organic crystals is a formidable theoretical challenge as these are determined both by the electronic structure of the individual molecules and by the morphology of the crystal. Quest's research program seeks at developing a fully quantitative theory for electron and spin transport in organic crystals, which does not rely on external parameters and can be applied to materials underpinning a multitude of applications, ranging from organic electronics, to spintronics, to energy. In particular we aim at combining state of the art density functional theory with advanced quantum transport methods and Monte Carlo simulations. We will then construct a hierarchical computational protocol enabling us to evaluate electron and spin transport across different length scales at finite temperature, including effects originating from external fields (electric and magnetic). Our developed tools will form a software package to be distributed freely to academia.

1 492 728 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

"This project will produce a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the ways in which women’s writing was received and circulated in the early modern period. By exploring the phenomenon of early modern literary reception in a rigorous and comprehensive way, the project will allow us to see more clearly the importance and function of reception; specifically how the field of reception articulates and develops critical and aesthetic engagements, how it reveals the extent to which gender shapes ideas about authorship, and how it historicizes our current debates about intellectual impact and gender. Existing reception scholarship has focused on qualitative case studies and tended to prioritize print culture; the field requires a quantitative approach that takes full account of the realities of textual transmission in a period when manuscript circulation retained its broad appeal. RECIRC overcomes the logistical challenges by focusing on the category of the manuscript miscellany and on networks as centres of textual circulation, producing new knowledge about transmission and book ownership. The project will test the hypothesis that the attribution of texts to anonymous, pseudonymous and gender-designated authors is revelatory regarding how gender determined reception. RECIRC’s specific objectives are: to challenge assumptions that women’s penetration of the literary field in this period was limited by focusing on textual reception rather than production; to transform current thinking on the nature of impact and the quality of reception by classifying and analysing the modes of textual engagement in new ways; to provoke a new understanding of the invention of the author in this period by approaching the question via reception, grounding it in a gendered understanding of the complex constructions of authorship that includes the exploitation of anonymity and pseudonymity; and to advance current discourses about scholarly impact by opening up and critiquing their historical contexts."

1 823 928 €

Start date: 2014-07-01, End date: 2019-06-30

With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities: reducing consumption; conserving resources, preventing waste and providing new forms of socio-economic relations. However, such claims currently rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. SHARECITY will identify and examine diverse practices of city-based food sharing economies, first determining their form, function and governance and then identifying their impact and potential to reorient eating practices. The research has four objectives: to advance theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing economies in cities; to generate a significant body of comparative and novel international empirical knowledge about food sharing economies and their governance within global cities; to design and test an assessment framework for establishing the impact of city-based food sharing economies on societal relations, economic vitality and the environment; and to develop and implement a novel variant of backcasting to explore how food sharing economies within cities might evolve in the future. Providing conceptual insights that bridge sharing, social practice and urban transitions theories, SHARECITY will generate a typology of food sharing economies; a database of food sharing activities in 100 global cities; in-depth food sharing profiles of 7 cities from the contrasting contexts of USA, Brazil and Germany, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Australia; a sustainability impact toolkit to enable examination of city-based food sharing initiatives; and scenarios for future food sharing in cities. Conducting such frontier science SHARECITY will open new research horizons to substantively improve understanding of how, why and to what end people share food within cities in the 21st Century.

1 860 009 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2021-07-31

SouthHem is a five-year research project designed to rethink and realign the nature and scope of British Romanticism by giving settler and indigenous literatures produced in the British-controlled Southern Hemisphere a more central role in defining the literary culture of the period 1783-1870. The project will carry out, for the first time, a detailed comparative analysis of these literatures and their interactions with British Romantic writing by focusing on case studies of encounter and transculturation in three transnational zones: “Zone 1” (Oceania): Australia and New Zealand; “Zone 2” (Southern Africa): the Cape Colony and Natal; and “Zone 3” (South-East Asia): Singapore, Java, and Malacca. The project has three inter-related aims: first, to consider the reciprocal transformations of literary themes, genres, standards, and forms in the British-controlled Southern Hemisphere and Britain; second, to rethink the ways in which nationhood, nationalism, and, in particular, national literature emerged in Britain and elsewhere by considering the global origins of nationalism; and third to problematise traditional periodisations of British Romanticism as beginning in the 1790s and ending in the 1830s. By radically expanding the type, provenance, and sample size of texts typically considered in studies of British Romanticism, this project will not only result in an important geographic, temporal, and conceptual rethinking of the field, but it will also provide a better understanding of how literary modernity emerged and developed outside of Europe and the Northern Hemisphere. As such, the project will facilitate larger cross-imperial and synthetic studies of the indigenous and settler literatures of the period.

1 487 938 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

The creation and accumulation of knowledge are processes at the heart of technological change and economic growth. Attention has been directed at aggregate measures of knowledge production in regional and national contexts, but little consideration has been given to the properties of knowledge produced in specific places. How does the nature of knowledge that is produced vary over space, what conditions the scope of technologies generated in different locations, and how do these knowledge sets impact the performance of local firms and industries? To date, the way in which specific regional knowledge capabilities influence the evolution of local technology trajectories and thus shape geographies of economic prosperity have not yet been considered systematically. The objective of the “Technology Evolution in Regional Economies” (TechEvo) project is to address these significant shortcomings. Focusing on the evolution of scientific and technical knowledge, as indicated by patent, trademark and scientific literature records, the point of departure is the pan-European knowledge space for all 28 European Union member countries, plus Norway and Switzerland, over the time period 1981-2015. The knowledge space, based on the co-occurrence matrix of particular knowledge domains (629), maps the proximity of patent technology classes and enables the development of regional measures of knowledge specialization for all 1,369 (NUTS3) regions. Set in an evolutionary framework the investigation provides ground breaking insights into how innovative entities and individual inventors are embedded in social and cognitive local and non-local networks, and how regional technology trajectories are shaped through entry, exit, and selection processes. TechEvo will provide a wealth of indicators, models and tools that will assist firms and policy makers in place-based investment decisions, and deliver a science and technology policy evaluation tool capable of assessing impact.

1 496 599 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28