ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The AlchemEast project is devoted to the study of alchemical theory and practice as it appeared and developed in distinct, albeit contiguous (both chronologically and geographically) areas: Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East, from Ancient Babylonian times to the early Islamic Period. This project combines innovative textual investigations with experimental replications of ancient alchemical procedures. It uses sets of historically and philologically informed laboratory replications in order to reconstruct the actual practice of ancient alchemists, and it studies the texts and literary forms in which this practice was conceptualized and transmitted. It proposes new models for textual criticism in order to capture the fluidity of the transmission of ancient alchemical writings. AlchemEast is designed to carry out a comparative investigation of cuneiform tablets as well as a vast corpus of Greek, Syriac and Arabic writings. It will overcome the old, pejorative paradigm that dismissed ancient alchemy as a "pseudo-science", by proposing a new theoretical framework for comprehending the entirety of ancient alchemical practices and theories. Alongside established forms of scholarly output, such as critical editions of key texts, AlchemEast will provide an integrative, longue durée perspective on the many different phases of ancient alchemy. It will thus offer a radically new vision of this discipline as a dynamic and diversified art that developed across different technical and scholastic traditions. This new representation will allow us to connect ancient alchemy with medieval and early modern alchemy and thus fully reintegrate ancient alchemy in the history of pre-modern alchemy as well as in the history of ancient science more broadly.

1 997 000 €

Start date: 2017-12-01, End date: 2022-11-30

Dante Alighieri at the dawn of the 1300s, as well as Eustache Deschamps almost a century later, conceived poetry as music in itself. But what happens with poetry when it is involved in the complex architecture of polyphony? The aim of this project is to study for the first time the corpus of 14th- and early 15th-century poetry set to music by Ars Nova polyphonists (more than 1200 texts). This repertoire gathers different poetic and musical traditions, as shown by the multilingual anthologies copied during the last years of the Schism. The choice of this corpus is motivated by two primary goals: a) to offer a new interpretation of its meaning and function in the cultural and historical context, one that may be then applied to the rest of coeval European lyric poetry; b) to overcome current disciplinary divisions in order to generate a new methodological balance between the project’s two main fields of interest (Comparative Literature / Musicology). Most Ars Nova polyphonists were directly associated with religious institutions. In many texts, the language of courtly love expresses the values of caritas, the theological virtue that guides wise rulers and leads them to desire the common good. Thus, the poetic figure of the lover becomes a metaphor for the political man, and love poetry can be used as a device for diplomacy, as well as for personal and institutional propaganda. From this unprecedented point of view, the project will develop three research lines in response to the following questions: 1) How is the relationship between poetry and music, and how is the dialogue between the different poetic and musical traditions viewed in relation to each context of production? 2) To what extent does Ars Nova poetry take part in the ‘soft power’ strategies exercised by the entire European political class of the time? 3) Is there a connection between the multilingualism of the manuscript tradition and the perception of the Ars Nova as a European, intercultural repertoire?

2 193 375 €

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

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect 1-2% of the population and are a major public health issue. Heterogeneity between affected ASD individuals is substantial both at clinical and etiological levels, thus warranting the idea that we should begin characterizing the ASD population as multiple kinds of ‘autisms’. Without an advanced understanding of how heterogeneity manifests in ASD, it is likely that we will not make pronounced progress towards translational research goals that can have real impact on patient’s lives. This research program is focused on decomposing heterogeneity in ASD at multiple levels of analysis. Using multiple ‘big data’ resources that are both ‘broad’ (large sample size) and ‘deep’ (multiple levels of analysis measured within each individual), I will examine how known variables such as sex, early language development, early social preferences, and early intervention treatment response may be important stratification variables that differentiate ASD subgroups at phenotypic, neural systems/circuits, and genomic levels of analysis. In addition to examining known stratification variables, this research program will engage in data-driven discovery via application of advanced unsupervised computational techniques that can highlight novel multivariate distinctions in the data that signal important ASD subgroups. These data-driven approaches may hold promise for discovering novel ASD subgroups at biological and phenotypic levels of analysis that may be valuable for prioritization in future work developing personalized assessment, monitoring, and treatment strategies for subsets of the ASD population. By enhancing the precision of our understanding about multiple subtypes of ASD this work will help accelerate progress towards the ideals of personalized medicine and help to reduce the burden of ASD on individuals, families, and society.

1 499 444 €

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

This project will undertake the first systematic investigation of the various literary documents that circulated simultaneously in more than one language in Tuscany, and especially Florence, between the mid-13th Century and the beginning of 15th Century. During that period, Florence was both a prominent literary centre in the vernacular, and home to a renewal of classical Latin eloquence. While both fields are well studied, their interaction remains largely unexplored. This research, at the convergence of several disciplines (literature, philology, linguistics and medieval history), has a strong pioneering character. It aims at changing the perception of medieval Italian culture and interpretation of the break between medieval Culture and Humanism. For this reason, the project will develop research in varying degrees of depth. First, it will provide the first catalogue of bilingual texts and manuscripts of medieval Tuscany. Organized as a database, this tool of analysis will stir innovative research in this field, some of which will be immediately promoted during the project. Secondly, two case studies, considered as important and methodologically exemplary, will be researched in detail, through the publication of two important set of texts, of secular and religious nature : 1. The vernacular translation of the Latin Epistles of Dante Alighieri; 2. A collection of polemical, historiographical, devotional and prophetical documents produced by the Tuscan dissident Franciscans in last decades of the 14th Century. Finally, the entire team, led by the PI, will be involved in the preparation of a synthesis volume on Tuscan culture in the fourteenth century viewed through bilingualism, entitled Cartography of bilingual culture in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany. From this general map of the Italian culture of the time, no literary genre nor field (be it religious or lay) shall be excluded.

1 480 625 €

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

Challenging the notion of Fortress Europe , the research investigates relations between the European Union and its southern periphery through the concept of borderlands . The concept emphasises the disaggregation of the triple function of borders demarcating state territory, authority, and national identity inherent in the Westphalian model of statehood. This process is most visible in (although not limited to) Europe, where integration has led to supranational areas of sovereignty, an internal market, a common currency, and a zone of free movement of people, each with a different territorial span. The project explores the complex and differentiated process by which the EU extends its unbundled functional and legal borders to the so-called southern Mediterranean (North Africa and parts of the Middle East), thereby transforming it into borderlands . They connect the European core with the periphery through various legal and functional border regimes, governance patterns, and the selective outsourcing of some EU border control duties. The overarching questions informing this research is whether, first, the borderland policies of the EU, described by some as a neo-medieval empire, is a functional consequence of the specific integration model pursued inside the EU, a matter of foreign policy choice or a local manifestation of a broader global phenomenon. Second, the project addresses the question of power dynamics that underwrite borderland governance, presuming a growing leverage of third country governments resulting from their co-optation as gatekeepers. Thus, while adopting an innovative approach, the project will enhance our understanding of EU-Mediterranean relations while also addressing crucial theoretical questions in international relations.

1 353 920 €

Start date: 2011-10-01, End date: 2017-03-31

The developing world has been plagued by many civil conflicts in the past thirty years. Understanding the roots and the consequences of these conflicts is crucial to fight poverty. This project will take an economic approach to investigate the interplay between cultural, political and economic determinants of conflict in poor countries. I will assess the role of domestic and international factors. Domestic factors include variables such as cultural identity, income inequality, resource endowments and geography. I will re-examine the role of ethnic diversity using original multi-dimensional indicators. These take into account that the salience of ethnic identity may depend on how much it overlaps with categories based on income, education, etc. I will also re-assess the role of natural resource abundance from a theoretical and empirical standpoint. I will develop a theory of how rebel groups are organized drawing on the theory of incentives and test it using detailed geographic information on the location of mineral deposits in Africa. I will also analyze the role of international players using a methodology based on financial markets’ reactions to news. This methodology will allow me to address questions such as: Which companies gain or lose from violent conflict? How can we detect violations of international embargoes? What are the private incentives of complying with international norms, i.e. can reputation costs be quantified? These are questions of paramount importance from a policy perspective and on which almost no academic research exists in economics. Overall, the project should help integrate economic, social and political explanations for the occurrence of conflict in developing countries. I expect that its outcome should comprise the creation of new datasets, propose new methodological tools and offer some insights for designing economic policies to prevent conflict and fight poverty.

429 480 €

Start date: 2008-06-01, End date: 2013-05-31

The European dimension of administrative law is the focus of a flurry of initiatives aiming to investigate similarities and differences, and to shape common legal scenarios. A codification of the administrative procedures of the EU has been envisaged by the European Parliament in its resolution of February 2013. A broader proposal of codification, including rule-making and contractual procedures, has been elaborated by ReNEUAL and has been discussed in a series of workshops in 2015. The issues that arise are both practical and theoretical: - it is important to understand whether the method traditionally followed by the European Court of Justice in order to identify the principles that are general and common to national legal systems, only applies when all those systems recognize such principles; - whether national systems of public law share the same idea of what an administrative procedure is is another question; whether the specific principles governing administrative procedures, such as the right to be heard and the duty to give reasons, are the same is still another question; - finally, if any commonality exists, the question that arises is whether it is limited to the level of general principles of law or it includes the which govern procedures. The research project is innovative on grounds of method, because: - it aims at ascertaining whether, and the extent to that, the well-established methodology developed under the ‘Common Core of European Private Law’ project can be applied to EU administrative law; - it permits to distinguish between ‘operative rules’, ‘descriptive formants’, and ‘meta-legal formants’; - it also allows to understand whether the specific nature of the interests recognized and protected by the rules of public law require legal methodologies that are distinct and distant from those of private law.

1 254 105 €

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

The project will be using the Gender and Generations Surveys (GGS) – a system of comparable micro-level surveys for several Developed countries – to analyse the consequences of demographic change. The analysis will be using households and individuals as the unit of observation. As a result, we will be able to make inferences about how certain demographic behaviours (i.e. childbearing, marital disruption, single motherhood, leaving home), including their timing and sequencing, affect certain outcomes, such as income, poverty, deprivation, together with various child outcomes. This analysis is particularly relevant given recent demographic trends in developed countries (e.g. divorce rates are increasing, out-of-wedlock childbearing is becoming more prevalent, and general delay in key demographic events such as childbearing and leaving the parental home). The novelty of the study is driven by its focus on consequences of newly emerging demographic patterns and behaviour, which is in contrast to the majority of previous demographic studies – which has tended to focus on the determinants behind these trends. Policy analysis has not had a strong tradition in Demography and the aim of this project is to rectify this shortcoming of the discipline. By focusing on the consequences of demographic change and using techniques that are borrowed from program evaluation, econometrics, applied statistics and empirical sociology, we aim to advance the understanding of how demographic events impact other important processes in the life course of individuals and how policy makers can best influence such outcomes by appropriate policy interventions.

750 000 €

Start date: 2008-07-01, End date: 2013-06-30

The foundation of lived experience is that it occurs in a particular space and time. Objects, events and actions happen in the present moment in a unified space which surrounds our body. As noted by Immanuel Kant, space and time are a priori concepts that organize our thoughts and experiences. Yet basic laboratory experiments reveal the cracks in this illusion of a unified perceptual space-time. Our subjective experience is a construction created out of the responses of numerous sensory detectors which give only limited information. In terms of space, the sensory input from a multitude of tiny windows is organized based on the coordinates of the receptor system, such as the fingertip or a specific location on the retina. In terms of time, sensory input is summed over a limited period which varies widely across different receptor types. Critically, none of these sensory detectors has a spatial-temporal response that corresponds to our subjective experience. Nonetheless, the mind constructs an illusion of unified space and continuous time out of the variegated responses. The goal of this project is to uncover the mechanisms underlying smooth and continuous perception. This project builds on a decade of groundwork in studying specific instances of the integration of visual information over space and time with a new focus on the mechanisms that unite the various phenomena which have up to now been studied separately. A combination of behavioral, neuroimaging and computational approaches will be used to identify the mechanisms underlying spatio-temporal continuity in high-level perception. We will track the dynamic shifts between the various temporal and spatial coordinate frames used to encode information in the brain, a topic which has remained largely unexplored. This research project, driven by specific hypotheses, aims to uncover how uni-sensory, ego-centric sensory responses give rise to the rich, multisensory experience of unified space-time.

1 002 102 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31