ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account. Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children. The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.

1 452 500 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

In 380 CE, the Emperor Theodosius (d. 395) ordered all Roman subjects to follow Catholic Christianity and limited imperial patronage to the Catholic Church. Theodosius was the last ruler to reign over a united empire. At his death the realm was divided into two halves, and by the end of Gregory the Great’s papacy (d. 604), a mosaic of independent kingdoms had replaced the western part of the empire. Yet despite the political division, during this period western clerics built a supra-regional ecclesiastical structure with substantial levels of hierarchy and cohesion. Up to the 1950s historians have largely conceived of these ecclesiastical institutions as organizations with widely accepted power. More recent scholarship, however, has revealed the social origin and fallibility of clerical authority. Nonetheless, this move away from the study of institutions has left unanswered the fundamental questions of how a ‘universal’ church was built at a time of political fragmentation, and how the transition from informal mutual aid to more formal hierarchical structures of law- and policy-making came about. With innovative methods of social inquiry we can offer new answers to these historiographical questions. Our project (CONNEC) will use social network analysis and new institutional theory to trace four processes: how clerical networks adapted to the new secular contexts, how these interactions shaped the development of ecclesiastical law, how clerics constructed and disseminated discourses that supported different structures of the church, and how networks fostered compliance and a sense of accountability among clerics. CONNEC’s use of state-of-the-art methods will be enhanced by the implementation of cutting-edge digital technologies, adapting network analysis software for late antique sources. By bringing together digital tools with qualitative textual analysis, CONNEC will provide a more nuanced understanding of a key process of world history.

1 465 316 €

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

This project aims to establish criteria by which results from language contact studies can be used to strengthen the field of historical linguistics. It does so by applying the scenario model for language contact studies to a number of concrete settings, which differ widely in their level of aggregation and dime depth: the languages of the Amazonian fringe in South America, the complex multilingual setting of the Republic of Suriname, the multilingual interaction of immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and two groups of multilingual individuals. New methods from structural phylogenetics are employed, and the same linguistic variables (TMA and evidentiality marking, argument realization) will be studied in the various projects. In the various projects, use will be made from a shared questionnaire, so that comparable data can be gathered. By applying the scenaio model at various levels of aggregation, a more principled link between language contact studies and historical linguistics can be established.

2 499 950 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

With COVOPRIM I propose to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of one often overlooked component of speech and language: voice perception. Perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception will be compared between humans, macaques and marmosets –two highly vocal and extensively studied monkey species–to quantify cross-species differences and infer mechanisms potentially inherited from a common ancestor. Two key building blocks of vocal communication detailed in my past research in humans will be compared across species: (1) the sensitivity to conspecific vocalizations, and (2) the processing of speaker/caller identity. COVOPRIM is organized in three workpackages (WPs). WP1 will use large-scale behavioural testing based on ad-lib access of monkeys to automated test systems (following the highly successful model developed locally with baboons). Two main behavioural experiments will establish psychometric response functions for robust cross-species comparison. WP2 will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cerebral activity during auditory stimulation in the three species. I will compare across brains the organization of what I hypothesize constitutes a “voice patch system” similar to the face patch system of visual cortex and broadly conserved in primates. I will also take advantage of the monkey models and use long-term, subject-specific enrichments of the auditory stimulation to probe the experience-dependence of neural coding in the voice patch system—an outstanding issue in human voice perception. WP3 will use fMRI-guided microstimulation in monkeys and transcranial magnetic stimulation in humans to establish the effective connectivity within the voice patch system and test the causal relation between voice patch neuronal activity and voice perception behaviour. COVOPRIM is expected to generate considerable advances in our understanding of the recent evolution in primates of the perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception.

2 900 000 €

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

Why are some people more likely to commit crime than others? Answers to this question, which is at the heart of criminology, can be grouped into two broad views. On the one hand, dispositional perspectives argue that stable factors within the individual, such as lack of self-control, lie at the roots of criminal conduct. Sociogenic perspectives, on the other hand, put the locus of study outside the individual and point towards factors such as rough neighborhoods, parental unemployment, and deviant peers, as the main causes of crime. In spite of ample empirical support for both views, there has been relatively little constructive engagement with each other. Capitalizing on my multidisciplinary background and drawing on social psychology and evolutionary theory, I outline a new perspective on criminal behavior –Time Frame Theory (TFT)– that integrates both views. TFT is premised on the idea that short-term mindsets encourage crime and specifies how both individual dispositions and sociogenic variables can encourage such mindsets. I test this theory using a combination of longitudinal research and behavioral field experiments. Besides aiming to mend the current theoretical disconnect in criminology and providing the foundation for a common paradigm, the proposed research program goes a step further by using TFT as the basis for a behavioral intervention to reduce crime. Building on recent pilot research, I use virtual reality technology in combination with a smartphone application to instill a future-oriented mindset in offenders. I am convinced that this combination of novel theory and innovative methodology may lead not only to a breakthrough in our understanding of delinquency but can also provide a blueprint for a scalable and evidence-based intervention to reduce it.

1 763 690 €

Start date: 2018-04-01, End date: 2023-03-31

The chronology of ancient Egypt is a golden thread for the memory of early civilisation. It is not only the scaffolding of four millennia of Egyptian history, but also one of the pillars of the chronology of the entire ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean. The basic division of Egyptian history into 31 dynasties was introduced by Manetho, an Egyptian historian (c. 280 BC) writing in Greek for the Ptolemaic kings. Despite the fact that this scheme was adopted by Egyptologists 200 years ago and remains in use until today, there has never been an in-depth analysis of Manetho’s kinglist and of the names in it. Until now, identifying the Greek renderings of royal names with their hieroglyphic counterparts was more or less educated guesswork. It is thus essential to introduce the principles of textual criticism, to evaluate royal names on a firm linguistic basis and to provide for the first time ever an Egyptological commentary on Manetho’s kinglist. Just like Manetho did long ago, now it is necessary to gather all inscriptional evidence on Egyptian history: dated inscriptions, biographic and prosopographic data of royalty and commoners, genuine Egyptian kinglists and annals. These data must be critically evaluated in context, their assignment to specific reigns must be reconsidered, and genealogies and sequences of officials must be reviewed. The results are not only important for Egyptian historical chronology and for our understanding of the Egyptian perception of history, but also for the interpretation of chronological data gained from archaeological excavations (material culture) and sciences (14C dates, which are interpreted on the basis of historical chronology, e.g., via ‘Bayesian modelling’). The applicant has already shown the significance of this approach in pilot studies on the pyramid age. Further work in cooperation with international specialists will thus shed new light on ancient sources in order to determine the chronology of early civilisation.

1 499 992 €

Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28

Evidence of a growing disengagement of citizens from politics is multiplying. Electoral turnout reaches historically low levels. Anti-establishment and populist parties are on the rise. Fewer and fewer Europeans trust their representative institutions. In response, we have observed a multiplication of institutional reforms aimed at revitalizing representative democracy. Two in particular stand out: the delegation of some political decision-making powers to (1) selected citizens and to (2) selected experts. But there is a paradox in attempting to cure the crisis of representative democracy by introducing such reforms. In representative democracy, control over political decision-making is vested in elected representatives. Delegating political decision-making to selected experts/citizens is at odds with this definition. It empowers the non-elected. If these reforms show that politics could work without elected officials, could we really expect that citizens’ support for representative democracy would be boosted and that citizens would re-engage with representative politics? In that sense, would it be a cure for the crisis of representative democracy, or rather a curse? Our central hypothesis is that there is no universal and univocal healing (or harming) effect of non-elected politics on support for representative democracy. In order to verify it, I propose to collect data across Europe on three elements: (1) a detailed study of the preferences of Europeans on how democracy should work and on institutional reforms towards non-elected politics, (2) a comprehensive inventory of all actual cases of empowerment of citizens and experts implemented across Europe since 2000, and (3) an analysis of the impact of exposure to non-elected politics on citizens’ attitudes towards representative democracy. An innovative combination of online survey experiments and of panel surveys will be used to answer this topical research question with far-reaching societal implication.

1 981 589 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

This project explores the meaning of social justice in an age of datafication. It is premised on two significant developments: 1) the shift to a focus on the collection and processing of massive amounts of data across social life and 2) the increasing concern with the societal implications of such processes. Whilst initial concern with the technical ability to ‘datafy’ and collect information on ever-more social activity focused on surveillance and privacy, increasing emphasis is being placed on the fact that data processes are not ‘flat’ and do not implicate everyone in the same way, but, rather, are part of a system of ‘social sorting’, creating new categories of citizens, and premised on an emerging order of ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ between data profilers and data subjects. In such a context, questions of social justice and datafication require detailed study. This project frames this research agenda around the notion of ‘data justice’. It will provide a European framework of study and take a holistic approach by situating research on data processes in the context of a) the concrete experiences and practices of particular communities; b) technological analyses of data sources, algorithmic process and data output; c) policy frameworks that relate to the interplay between digital rights and social and economic rights; and d) conceptual engagement with new social stratifications emerging with datafication. The project is ground-breaking in five different respects: i) it conceptually advances the meaning of social justice in a datafied society; ii) it shifts and challenges dominant understandings of data by highlighting its relation to social and economic rights; iii) it addresses an uncharted but rapidly growing response to datafication in civil society; iv) it breaks down disciplinary boundaries in understandings of technology, power, politics and social change; and v) it pursues a combination of engaged research and socio-technical modes of investigation.

1 383 920 €

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

The switch from parchment to paper had a fundamental impact on later medieval universities, equivalent to the shift to Open Access today, hindering some intellectual practices while encouraging others. The DEBATE project identifies a neglected genre of latin texts that flourished on paper, the Principia, which record the public confrontations between candidates (socii) for the title of doctor. These debates, imposed by university statutes throughout Europe as annual exercises linked to lectures on the Sentences (the medieval parallel to our PhD thesis), forced the candidate to reveal his innovative theories (sheets of papers were exchanged among the socii beforehand), display his erudition and prove his intellectual prowess before a large audience. The futuristic discussion usually exceeded the confines of one discipline and allowed the bachelor to indulge his interdisciplinary interests, employing science, theology, mathematics, politics, literature, and rhetoric in his polemics against his colleagues. Principia thus reveal the cutting edge method of fostering science in later medieval universities. The DEBATE team intends to identify new manuscripts, edit the texts, establish authorship for anonymous fragments and propose an interpretation that will help explain how innovation was a primordial target in medieval academia. Putting together all the surviving texts of Principia produced in various cultural contexts, this project will provide a wealth of material that will bring about a basic change in our understanding of the mechanism of the production of academic knowledge in the early universities all around Europe.The project is designed to promote erudition by combining a palaeographical, codicological, editorial and hermeneutical approach, aiming to open an advanced area of inquiry focusing on an intellectual practice that bound together medieval universities from different geographical and cultural regions: Paris, Bologna, Vienna, Prague, Krakow and Cologne.

1 997 976 €

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