ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The Acts of the Ecumenical Councils of Late Antiquity include (purportedly) verbatim minutes of the proceedings, a formal framework and copies of relevant documents which were either (allegedly) read out during the proceedings or which were later attached to the Acts proper. Despite this unusual wealth of documentary evidence, the daunting nature of the Acts demanding multidisciplinary competency, their complex structure with a matryoshka-like nesting of proceedings from different dates, and the stereotype that their contents bear only on Christological niceties have deterred generations of historians from studying them. Only in recent years have their fortunes begun to improve, but this recent research has not always been based on sound principles: the recorded proceedings of the sessions are still often accepted as verbatim minutes. Yet even a superficial reading quickly reveals widespread editorial interference. We must accept that in many cases the Acts will teach us less about the actual debates than about the editors who shaped their presentation. This does not depreciate the Acts’ evidence: on the contrary, they are first-rate material for the rhetoric of persuasion and self-representation. It is possible, in fact, to take the investigation to a deeper level and examine in what manner the oral proceedings were put into writing: several passages in the Acts comment upon the process of note-taking and the work of the shorthand writers. Thus, the main objective of the proposed research project could be described as an attempt to trace the destinies of the Acts’ texts, from the oral utterance to the manuscript texts we have today. This will include the fullest study on ancient transcript techniques to date; a structural analysis of the Acts’ texts with the aim of highlighting edited passages; and a careful comparison of the various editions of the Acts, which survive in Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic, in order to detect traces of editorial interference.

1 497 250 €

Start date: 2016-05-01, End date: 2021-04-30

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

This research will create a new theoretical vision of the importance of marriage as an agent of transformation in human sociality. Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking intense debate and anxiety. These concerns refract wider instabilities in political, economic, and familial institutions. They signal the critical role of marriage in bringing together - and separating - intimate, personal, and familial life with wider state institutions. But we have little up to date comparative research or general theory of how marriage changes or the long-term significance of such change. Paradoxically, social scientific and public discourse emphasise the conservative and normative aspects of marriage. This underlines the need for a new theoretical frame that takes account of cultural and historical specificity to grasp the importance of marriage as both vehicle of and engine for transformation. AGATM overturns conventional understandings by viewing marriage as inherently transformative, indeed at the heart of social and cultural change. The research will investigate current transformations of marriage in two distinct senses. First, it will undertake an ethnographic investigation of new forms of marriage in selected sites in Europe, N. America, Asia, and Africa. Second, it will subject ‘marriage’ to a rigorous theoretical critique that will denaturalise marriage and reintegrate it into the new anthropology of kinship. Research on five complementary and contrastive sub-projects examining emerging forms of marriage in different locations will be structured through the themes of care, property, and ritual forms. The overarching analytic of temporality will frame the theoretical vision of the research and connect the themes. The resulting six monographs, journal articles, and exhibition will together revitalise the study of kinship by placing the moral, practical, political, and imaginative significance of marriage over time at its centre.

2 297 584 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

This interdisciplinary project investigates the transformation of Shii Islam in the Middle East and Europe since the 1950s. The project examines the formation of modern Shii communal identities and the role Shii clerical authorities and their transnational networks have played in their religio-political mobilisation. The volatile situation post-Arab Spring, the rise of militant movements such as ISIS and the sectarianisation of geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East have intensified efforts to forge distinct Shii communal identities and to conceive Shii Muslims as part of an alternative umma (Islamic community). The project focusses on Iran, Iraq and significant but unexplored diasporic links to Syria, Kuwait and Britain. In response to the rise of modern nation-states in the Middle East, Shii clerical authorities resorted to a wide range of activities: (a) articulating intellectual responses to the ideologies underpinning modern Middle Eastern nation-states, (b) forming political parties and other platforms of socio-political activism and (c) using various forms of cultural production by systematising and promoting Shii ritual practices and utilising visual art, poetry and new media. The project yields a perspectival shift on the factors that led to Shii communal mobilisation by: - Analysing unacknowledged intellectual responses of Shii clerical authorities to the secular or sectarian ideologies of post-colonial nation-states and to the current sectarianisation of geopolitics in the Middle East. - Emphasising the central role of diasporic networks in the Middle East and Europe in mobilising Shii communities and in influencing discourses and agendas of clerical authorities based in Iraq and Iran. - Exploring new modes of cultural production in the form of a modern Shii aesthetics articulated in ritual practices, visual art, poetry and new media and thus creating a more holistic narrative on Shii religio-political mobilisation.

1 952 374 €

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

"Recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Immersive and interactive virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the perceiver a strong feeling of being incorporated in a quasi-real world. In doing so such pictures conceal their mediateness (their being based on a material support), their referentiality (their pointing to an extra-iconic dimension), and their separateness (normally assured by framing devices), paradoxically challenging their status as images, as icons: they are veritable “an-icons”. This kind of pictures undermines the mainstream paradigm of Western image theories, shared by major models such as the doctrine of mimesis, the phenomenological account of image-consciousness, the analytic theories of depiction, the semiotic and iconological methods. These approaches miss the key counter-properties regarding an-icons as ""environmental"" images: their immediateness, unframedness, and presentness. Subjects relating to an-icons are no longer visual observers of images; they are experiencers living in a quasi-real environment that allows multisensory affordances and embodied agencies. AN-ICON aims to develop “an-iconology” as a new methodological approach able to address this challenging iconoscape. Such an approach needs to be articulated in a transdisciplinary and transmedial way: 1) HISTORY – a media-archaeological reconstruction will provide a taxonomy of the manifold an-iconic strategies (e.g. illusionistic painting, pre-cinematic dispositifs, 3D films, video games, head mounted displays); 2) THEORY – an experiential account (drawing on phenomenology, visual culture and media studies) will identify the an-iconic key concepts; 3) PRACTICES – a socio-cultural section will explore the multifaceted impact of an-iconic images, environments and technologies on contemporary professional domains as well as on everyday life. "

2 328 736 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

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

The Arctic has risen to global attention in recent years, as it has been reconfigured through debates about global environmental change, resource extraction and disputes over sovereign rights. Within these discourses, little attention has been paid to the cultures of the Arctic. Indeed, it often seems as if the Circumpolar Arctic in global public understanding remains framed as a 'natural region' - that is, a place where the environment dominates the creation of culture. This framing has consequences for the region, because through this the Arctic becomes constructed as a space where people are absent. This proposal aims to discover how and why this might be so. The proposal argues that this construction of the Arctic emerged from the exploration of the region by Europeans and North Americans and their contacts with indigenous people from the middle of the eighteenth century. Particular texts, cartographic representations and objects were collected and returned to sites like London, Copenhagen, Berlin and Philadelphia. The construction of the Arctic thereby became entwined within the growth of colonial museum cultures and, indeed, western modernity. This project aims to delineate the networks and collecting cultures involved in this creation of Arctic Cultures. It will bring repositories in colonial metropoles into dialogue with sites of collection in the Arctic by tracing the contexts of discovery and memorialisation. In doing so, it aspires to a new understanding of the consequences of certain forms of colonial representation for debates about the Circumpolar Arctic today. The project involves research by the Principal Investigator and four Post Doctoral Researchers at museums, archives, libraries and repositories across Europe and North America, as well as in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. A Project Assistant based in Oxford will help facilitate the completion of the research.

1 996 250 €

Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30

This project aims to study: • the semantic development of the vocabulary of the Arabic language, • philological discourses on the semantic changes in the language in the classical Arabic philological tradition (8th-10th centuries A.D.), and • the impact of Arabic philology in the wider historical and cultural context of the Judaeo-Arab neo-classical heritage (12th-13th centuries A.D.) and Christian-Arab intellectual history on the eve of modernity (19th century A.D.). The project will explore the universal cultural significance and the pivotal role of language consciousness in the history of Arab culture. It will introduce a new dimension into the existing research on the Arabic language and Arabic philology, which until now have been studied without any comprehensive cultural and social contextualisation. The project will focus on the process of the transmission of Arabic poetry, which provides detailed evidence of the development of Arabic philological thought and its universal significance for the theological, philosophical, historical and linguistic discourses of Arab intellectual history. This project will document the transmission of early Arabic poetry and analyse its vocabulary in a systematic way for the first time. For this purpose it will create an Analytical Database of Arabic Poetry. This publicly accessible database will represent a ground-breaking contribution to European research on the Arabic language and the Arabic philological heritage, which so far lacks even such fundamental tools as an etymological dictionary of the Arabic language or a complete dictionary of Classical Arabic. The database will implement comprehensive analytical tools and will serve as a reference work for wider research on Arabic literature, history and culture. Thus, the project will create an integrative research platform for the history and semantics of the Arabic language—a subject indispensable for understanding the foundations of Arab culture past and present.

1 499 507 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

The transmission of ‘technique’ in art has been a conspicuous ‘black box’ resisting analysis. The tools of the humanities used to study the transmission of ideas and concepts are insufficient when it comes to understanding the transmission of something as non-propositional and non-verbal as ‘technique’. The insights of the neurosciences in, for example, the acquisition and transmission of drawing skills are not yet sufficiently advanced to be historically restrictive. However, only in the most recent years, the history of science and technology has turned to how-to instructions as given in recipes. This project proposes to undertake the experimental reconstruction of historical recipes to finally open the black box of the transmission of technique in the visual and decorative arts. Considering ‘technique’ as a textual, material and social practice, this project will write a long-term history of the theory and practice of the study of ‘technique’ in the visual and decorative arts between 1500 and 1950. The three central research questions here are: (1) what is technique in the visual and decorative arts, (2) how is technique transmitted and studied, and (3) who is considered expert in technique, and why? This project will make a breakthrough in our understanding of the transmission of technique in the arts by integrating methodologies typical for the humanities and historical disciplines with laboratory work. Also, by providing a history of technique in the arts, this project lays the historical foundations of the epistemologies of conservation, restoration and technical art history precisely at a moment of greatest urgency. The connection between the history of science and technology and the expertise in conservation, restoration and technical art history (in the Ateliergebouw in Amsterdam) this project envisions builds the intellectual infrastructure of a new field of interdisciplinary research, unique in Europe.

1 907 944 €

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