ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Pharaonic Egypt is commonly known for its pyramids and tomb treasures. The present knowledge of Egyptian everyday life and social structures derives mostly from mortuary records associated with the upper classes, whereas traces of ordinary life from domestic sites are generally disregarded. Settlement archaeology in Egypt and Nubia (Ancient North Sudan) is still in its infancy; it is timely to strenghten this field. Responsible for the pottery at three major settlement sites (Abydos and Elephantine in Egypt; Sai Island in Sudan), the PI is in a unique position to co-ordinate a research project on settlement patterns in Northeast Africa of the 2nd millennium BC based on the detailed analysis of material remains. The selected case studies situated across ancient and modern borders and of diverse environmental and cultural preconditions, show very similar archaeological remains. Up to now, no attempt has been made to explain this situation in detail. The focus of the project is the well-preserved, only partially explored site of Sai Island, seemingly an Egyptian microcosm in New Kingdom Upper Nubia. Little time is left to conduct the requisite large-scale archaeology as Sai is endangered by the planned high dam of Dal. With the application of microarchaeology we will introduce an approach that is new in Egyptian settlement archaeology. Our interdisciplinary research will result in novel insights into (a) multifaceted lives on Sai at a micro-spatial level and (b) domestic life in 2nd millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from a macroscopic view. The present understanding of the political situation in Upper Nubia during the New Kingdom as based on written records will be significantly enlarged by the envisaged approach. Furthermore, in reconstructing Sai Island as “home away from home”, the project presents a showcase study of what we can learn about acculturation and adaptation from ancient cultures, in this case from the coexistence of Egyptians and Nubians

1 497 460 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2018-04-30

"Since 1960, the television industry has undergone successive waves of technological change. Both the methods of programme making and the programmes themselves have changed substantially. The current opening of TV’s vast archives to public and academic use has emphasised the need to explain old programming to new users. Why particular programmes are like they are is not obvious to the contemporary viewer: the prevailing technologies imposed limits and enabled forms that have fallen into disuse. The project will examine the processes of change which gave rise to the particular dominant configurations of technologies for sound and image capture and processing, and some idea of the national and regional variants that existed. It will emphasise the capabilities of the machines in use rather than the process of their invention. The project therefore studies how the technologies of film and tape were implemented; how both broadcasters and individual filmers coped with the conflicting demands of the different machines at their disposal; how new ‘standard ways of doing things’ gradually emerged; and how all of this enabled desired changes in the resultant programmes. The project will produce an overall written account of the principal changes in the technologies in use in broadcast TV since 1960 to the near present. It will offer a theory of technological innovation, and a major case study in the adoption of digital workflow management in production for broadcasting: the so-called ‘tapeless environment’ which is currently being implemented in major organisations. It will offer two historical case studies: a longditudinal study of the evolution of tape-based sound recording and one of the rapid change from 16mm film cutting to digital editing, a process that took less than five years. Reconstructions of the process of working with particular technological arrays will be filmed and will be made available as explanatory material for any online archive of TV material ."

1 680 121 €

Start date: 2013-08-01, End date: 2018-07-31

The establishment of farming is a pivotal moment in human history, setting the stage for the emergence of class-based society and urbanization. Monolithic views of the nature and development of early agriculture, however, have prevented clear understanding of how exactly farming fuelled, shaped and sustained the emergence of complex societies. A breakthrough in archaeological approach is needed to determine the actual roles of farming in the emergence of social complexity. The methodology required must push beyond conventional interpretation of the most direct farming evidence – archaeobotanical remains of crops and associated arable weeds – to reconstruct not only what crops were grown, but also how, where and why farming was practised. Addressing these related aspects, in contexts ranging from early agricultural villages to some of the world’s earliest cities, would provide the key to unraveling the contribution of farming to the development of lasting social inequalities. The research proposed here takes a new interdisciplinary approach combining archaeobotany, plant stable isotope chemistry and functional plant ecology, building on groundwork laid in previous research by the applicant. These approaches will be applied to two relatively well researched areas, western Asia and Europe, where a series of sites that chart multiple pathways to early complex societies offer rich plant and other bioarchaeological assemblages. The proposed project will set a wholly new standard of insight into early farming and its relationship with early civilization, facilitating similar approaches in other parts of the world and the construction of comparative perspectives on the global significance of early agriculture in social development.

1 199 647 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2017-01-31

Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions. Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to: - Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it; - Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences; - Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe. ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.

1 871 250 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

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

This proposal outlines a highly ambitious and path-breaking research program. Through a tightly integrated package of basic theoretical work, strategic empirical research projects, international workshops, and a large number of publications in leading journals, the research program seeks to move sociology in a more analytical direction. One part of the research program focuses on the epistemological and methodological foundations of analytical sociology, an approach to sociological theory and research that currently receives considerable attention in the international scholarly community. This work will be organized around two core themes: (1) the principles of mechanism-based explanations and (2) the micro-macro link. The empirical research analyzes in great detail the ethnic, gender, and socio-economic segregation of key interaction domains in Sweden using the approach of analytical sociology. The interaction domains focused upon are schools, workplaces and neighborhoods; domains where people spend a considerable part of their time, where much of the social interaction between people takes place, where identities are formed, and where important resources are distributed. Large-scale longitudinal micro data on the entire Swedish population, unique longitudinal data on social networks within school classes, and various agent-based simulation techniques, are used to better understand the processes through which schools, workplaces and neighborhoods become segregated along various dimensions, how the domains interact with one another, and how the structure and extent of segregation affects diverse social and economic outcomes.

1 745 098 €

Start date: 2013-03-01, End date: 2018-02-28

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

Here we propose a first step toward a direct reconstruction of the evolutionary history of human infectious disease agents by obtaining genome wide data of historic pathogens. Through an extensive screening of skeletal collections from well-characterized catastrophe, or emergency, mass burials we plan to detect and sequence pathogen DNA from various historic pandemics spanning at least 2,500 years using a general purpose molecular capture method that will screen for hundreds of pathogens in a single assay. Subsequent experiments will attempt to reconstruct full genomes from all pathogenic species identified. The molecular fossil record of human pathogens will provide insights into host adaptation and evolutionary rates of infectious disease. In addition, human genomic regions relating to disease susceptibility and immunity will be characterized in the skeletal material in order to observe the direct effect that pathogens have made on the genetic makeup of human populations over time. The results of this project will allow a multidisciplinary interpretation of historical pandemics that have influenced the course of human history. It will provide priceless information for the field of history, evolutionary biology, anthropology as well as medicine and will have direct consequences on how we manage emerging and re-emerging infectious disease in the future.

1 474 560 €

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

Globular clusters (GCs) are enigmatic objects that hide a wealth of information. They are the living fossils of the history of their native galaxies and the record keepers of the violent events that made them change their domicile. This proposal aims to mine GCs as living fossils of galaxy evolution to address fundamental questions in astrophysics: (1) Do satellite galaxies merge as predicted by the hierarchical build-up of galaxies? (2) Which are the seeds of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies? (3) How did star formation originate in the earliest phases of galaxy formation? To answer these questions, novel population-dependent dynamical modelling techniques are required, whose development the PI has led over the past years. This uniquely positions him to take full advantage of the emerging wealth of chemical and kinematical data on GCs. Following the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies, their dense GCs, and maybe even their nuclei, are left as the most visible remnants in the main galaxy. The hierarchical build-up of their new host galaxy can thus be unearthed by recovering the GCs’ orbits. However, currently it is unclear which of the GCs are accretion survivors. Actually, the existence of a central intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) or of multiple stellar populations in GCs might tell which ones are accreted. At the same time, detection of IMBHs is important as they are predicted seeds for supermassive black holes in galaxies; while the multiple stellar populations in GCs are vital witnesses to the extreme modes of star formation in the early Universe. However, for every putative dynamical IMBH detection so far there is a corresponding non-detection; also the origin of multiple stellar populations in GCs still lacks any uncontrived explanation. The synergy of novel techniques and exquisite data proposed here promises a breakthrough in this emerging field of dynamical archeology with GCs as living fossils of the past of galaxies.

1 999 250 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

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

Knowledge is an anthropological constant that is indissociable from the birth and interactions of human societies, but is at best a secondary concern for scholars of international relations and globalization. Contemporary global studies are thus unable to account for the co-constitution of knowledge and politics at a macro-scale, and remain especially blind to the historical patterns of epistemic development that operate at the level of the species as a whole and have shaped its global political history in specific, path-dependent ways up to now. ARTEFACT is the first project to pursue a knowledge-centered investigation of global politics. It is uniquely grounded in an anthropological approach that treats globalization and human knowledges beyond their modern manifestations, from the longue-durée perspective of our species’ social history. 'The global as artefact' is more than a metaphor. It reflects the premise that human collectives 'make' the political world not merely through ideas, language, or norms, but primordially through the material infrastructures, solutions, objects, practices, and skills they develop in response to evolving structural challenges. ARTEFACT takes agriculture as an exemplary and especially timely case-study to illuminate the entangled global histories of knowledge and politics, analyzing and comparing four increasingly inclusive 'global political systems' of the Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary eras and their associated agrarian socio-epistemic revolutions. ARTEFACT ultimately aims to 1) develop an original theory of the global, 2) launch Global Knowledge Studies as a new cross-disciplinary domain of systematic empirical and theoretical study, and 3) push the respective boundaries of the anthropology of knowledge, global history, and international theory beyond the state-of-the-art and toward a holistic understanding that can illuminate how past trends of socio-epistemic evolution might shape future paths of global life.

1 428 165 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

Since 2012, over 4 million people have fled Syria in ‘the most dramatic humanitarian crisis that we have ever faced’ (UNHCR). By November 2015 there were 1,078,338 refugees from Syria in Lebanon, 630,776 in Jordan and 2,181,293 in Turkey. Humanitarian agencies and donor states from both the global North and the global South have funded and implemented aid programmes, and yet commentators have argued that civil society groups from the global South are the most significant actors supporting refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Whilst they are highly significant responses, however, major gaps in knowledge remain regarding the motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement. This project draws on multi-sited ethnographic and participatory research with refugees from Syria and their aid providers in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey to critically examine why, how and with what effect actors from the South have responded to the displacement of refugees from Syria. The main research aims are: 1. identifying diverse models of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement, 2. examining the (un)official motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses, 3. examining refugees’ experiences and perceptions of Southern-led responses, 4. exploring diverse Southern and Northern actors’ perceptions of Southern-led responses, 5. tracing the implications of Southern-led initiatives for humanitarian theory and practice. Based on a critical theoretical framework inspired by post-colonial and feminist approaches, the project contributes to theories of humanitarianism and debates regarding donor-recipient relations and refugees’ agency in displacement situations. It will also inform the development of policies to most appropriately address refugees’ needs and rights. This highly topical and innovative project thus has far-reaching implications for refugees and local communities, academics, policy-makers and practitioners.

1 498 069 €

Start date: 2017-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30

The overarching research question of this project is: how is authoritarian rule affected by and responding to globalisation of (a) information and communication, (b) association, and (c) people movement? The wholly unpredicted series of revolts that recently spread across the Arab world suggests that the nature and sustainability of contemporary authoritarian rule are not well-understood. Openness to global ICT and media, international NGOs, and inflow and outflow of people have thrown up new challenges for authoritarian rulers in terms of how to control citizens. This project investigates changes in both the nature and the sustainability of authoritarian rule in relation to the erosion of decision-making autonomy at the state level posited by globalisation theorists. In four sub-projects, this project will investigate: 1. Whether, how and to what extent globalisation of information and communication, association, and people movement affect authoritarian persistence (longitudinal quantitative study, 1970-2011) 2. How, i.e. with what policy mechanisms, authoritarian states respond to globalisation of information and communication, association, and people movement (qualitative multi-sited studies relating to Belarus, China, Iran and Zimbabwe) 3. How to understand the phenomenon of subnational authoritarianism in its engagement with the democratic state and the wider world in relation to information and communication, association, and people movement (mixed method subnational studies of states within India and Mexico) 4. What authoritarianism is in a global age: reconsidering authoritarianism’s defining characteristics of low accountability and high coercion, and whether these still relate exclusively to statehood (theory study) The project will transcend the theoretical and empirical separation between globalisation studies (which have neglected authoritarian contexts) and authoritarianism studies(which have taken relatively little notice of effects of globalisation)

2 451 179 €

Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2019-02-28

BabMed represents the first ever comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of cuneiform, comprising the largest ancient collection of medical data before Hippocrates. The latest phase of Babylonian medicine, as preserved in Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, has never been systematically studied in the light of older cuneiform materials. The absence of accessible cuneiform medical literature has forced recent medical histories to bypass Babylonian medicine, while Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud has simply been ignored. BabMed tests a number of 'high risk' propositions, including two key hypotheses: 1) cuneiform survived much longer than previously suspected, and 2) Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud mostly derives from Akkadian medicine. BabMed's methodology relies upon native taxonomies rather than modern biomedical disease classifications, countering flawed retrospective diagnoses that obviate the entire history of medicine. Comparisons with neighbouring medical systems challenge the prevalent Eurocentricity of current histories, in which Greek medicine has become the standard for all ancient medicine. BabMed will introduce a new paradigm for knowledge transfer which will recognise the barriers between ancient arts of medicine and how they were overcome in antiquity. One such barrier was script and language, and BabMed proposes that Babylonian medicine survived the death of cuneiform script and was preserved in part in the local Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, a unique text which straddles the borders of Greco-Roman Palestine and Persian Babylonia and mirrors the scientific thinking of both worlds.

2 233 747 €

Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30

A new generation of galaxy surveys will soon start measuring the spatial distribution of millions of galaxies over a broad range of redshifts, offering an imminent opportunity to discover new physics. A detailed comparison of these measurements with theoretical models of galaxy clustering may reveal a new fundamental particle, a breakdown of General Relativity, or a hint on the nature of cosmic acceleration. Despite a large progress in the analytic treatment of structure formation in recent years, traditional clustering models still suffer from large uncertainties. This limits cosmological analyses to a very restricted range of scales and statistics, which will be one of the main obstacles to reach a comprehensive exploitation of future surveys. Here I propose to develop a novel simulation--based approach to predict galaxy clustering. Combining recent advances in computational cosmology, from cosmological N--body calculations to physically-motivated galaxy formation models, I will develop a unified framework to directly predict the position and velocity of individual dark matter structures and galaxies as function of cosmological and astrophysical parameters. In this formulation, galaxy clustering will be a prediction of a set of physical assumptions in a given cosmological setting. The new theoretical framework will be flexible, accurate and fast: it will provide predictions for any clustering statistic, down to scales 100 times smaller than in state-of-the-art perturbation--theory--based models, and in less than 1 minute of CPU time. These advances will enable major improvements in future cosmological constraints, which will significantly increase the overall power of future surveys maximising our potential to discover new physics.

1 484 240 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

In the last forty years, researchers in the Field of Migration and Ethnic Studies looked at the integration of migrants and their descendants. Concepts, methodological tools and theoretical frameworks have been developed to measure and predict integration outcomes both across different ethnic groups and in comparison with people of native descent. But are we also looking into the actual integration of the receiving group of native ‘white’ descent in city contexts where they have become a numerical minority themselves? In cities like Amsterdam, now only one in three youngsters under age fifteen is of native descent. This situation, referred to as a majority-minority context, is a new phenomenon in Western Europe and it presents itself as one of the most important societal and psychological transformations of our time. I argue that the field of migration and ethnic studies is stagnating because of the one-sided focus on migrants and their children. This is even more urgent given the increased ant-immigrant vote. These pressing scientific and societal reasons pushed me to develop the project BAM (Becoming A Minority). The project will be executed in three harbor cities, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Malmö, and three service sector cities, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna. BAM consists of 5 subprojects: (1) A meta-analysis of secondary data on people of native ‘white’ descent in the six research sites; (2) A newly developed survey for the target group; (3) An analysis of critical circumstances of encounter that trigger either positive or rather negative responses to increased ethnic diversity (4) Experimental diversity labs to test under which circumstances people will change their attitudes or their actions towards increased ethnic diversity; (5) The formulation of a new theory of integration that includes the changed position of the group of native ‘white’ descent as an important actor.

2 499 714 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

The aim of BAPS is to develop a ground-breaking simulation model of international migration, based on a population of intelligent, cognitive agents, their social networks and institutions, all interacting with one another. The project will transform the study of migration – one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority EU policy area – by offering a step change in the way it can be understood, predicted and managed. In this way, BAPS will effectively integrate behavioural and social theory with modelling. To develop micro-foundations for migration studies, model design will follow cutting-edge developments in demography, statistics, cognitive psychology and computer science. BAPS will also offer a pioneering environment for applying the findings in practice through a bespoke modelling language. Bayesian statistical principles will be used to design innovative computer experiments, and learn about modelling the simulated individuals and the way they make decisions. In BAPS, we will collate available information for migration models; build and test the simulations by applying experimental design principles to enhance our knowledge of migration processes; collect information on the underpinning decision-making mechanisms through psychological experiments; and design software for implementing Bayesian agent-based models in practice. The project will use various information sources to build models bottom-up, filling an important epistemological gap in demography. BAPS will be carried out by the Allianz European Demographer 2015, recognised as a leader in the field for methodological innovation, directing an interdisciplinary team with expertise in demography, agent-based models, statistical analysis of uncertainty, meta-cognition, and computer simulations. The project will open up exciting research possibilities beyond demography, and will generate both academic and practical impact, offering methodological advice for policy-relevant simulations.

1 455 590 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2021-05-31

Social interactions are multifaceted and subtle, yet we can almost instantaneously discern if two people are cooperating or competing, flirting or fighting, or helping or hindering each other. Surprisingly, the development and brain basis of this remarkable ability has remained largely unexplored. At the same time, understanding how we develop the ability to process and use social information from other people is widely recognized as a core challenge facing developmental cognitive neuroscience. The Becoming Social project meets this challenge by proposing the most complete investigation to date of the development of the behavioural and neurobiological systems that support complex social perception. To achieve this, we first systematically map how the social interactions we observe are coded in the brain by testing typical adults. Next, we investigate developmental change both behaviourally and neurally during a key stage in social development in typically developing children. Finally, we explore whether social interaction perception is clinically relevant by investigating it developmentally in autism spectrum disorder. The Becoming Social project is expected to lead to a novel conception of the neurocognitive architecture supporting the perception of social interactions. In addition, neuroimaging and behavioural tasks measured longitudinally during development will allow us to determine how individual differences in brain and behaviour are causally related to real-world social ability and social learning. The planned studies as well as those generated during the project will enable the Becoming Social team to become a world-leading group bridging social cognition, neuroscience and developmental psychology.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31

"This proposal outlines projects to develop robust and portable theories studying the impact of psychological phenomena in economic settings. The proposed work falls in three broad research agendas. My first main agenda is to formally model and economically apply a simple observation: that when people make decisions, they do not focus equally on all attributes of their available options, and overweight the attributes they focus on. I will build a set of portable models of focusing in attribute-based choice and risky choice based on the idea that a person focuses more on attributes in which her options differ more. I will also use the framework to develop novel, focus-based, theories of intertemporal choice and social preferences, as well as analyze the implications of focusing for product design, principal-agent relationships, and other economic questions. My second main agenda is to explore some implications for market outcomes, welfare, and policy of the possibility that consumers misperceive certain aspects of products. I will investigate the circumstances that facilitate the profitable deception of consumers; firms' incentives for ""innovating"" deceptive products, including novel financial products aimed at exploiting investors; how firms' ability to distinguish naive and sophisticated consumers affects the consequences of deception; whether learning on the part of consumers will help them to avoid making mistakes; and how regulators and other observers can detect consumer mistakes from market data. Two further projects apply the model of reference-dependent utility I have developed in earlier work to understand the pricing and advertising behavior of firms. I will also aim to disseminate some of my work, along with other cutting-edge research in psychology and economics, in a Journal of Economic Literature survey on ""Behavioral Contract Theory."""

1 275 448 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2018-10-31

Massive stars play many key roles in Astrophysics. As COSMIC ENGINES they transformed the pristine Universe left after the Big Bang into our modern Universe. We use massive stars, their explosions and products as COSMIC PROBES to study the conditions in the distant Universe and the extreme physics inaccessible at earth. Models of massive stars are thus widely applied. A central common assumption is that massive stars are non-rotating single objects, in stark contrast with new data. Recent studies show that majority (70% according to our data) will experience severe interaction with a companion (Sana, de Mink et al. Science 2012). I propose to conduct the most ambitious and extensive exploration to date of the effects of binarity and rotation on the lives and fates of massive stars to (I) transform our understanding of the complex physical processes and how they operate in the vast parameter space and (II) explore the cosmological implications after calibrating and verifying the models. To achieve this ambitious objective I will use an innovative computational approach that combines the strength of two highly complementary codes and seek direct confrontation with observations to overcome the computational challenges that inhibited previous work. This timely project will provide the urgent theory framework needed for interpretation and guiding of observing programs with the new facilities (JWST, LSST, aLIGO/VIRGO). Public release of the model grids and code will ensure wide impact of this project. I am in the unique position to successfully lead this project because of my (i) extensive experience modeling the complex physical processes, (ii) leading role in introducing large statistical simulations in the massive star community and (iii) direct involvement in surveys that will be used in this project.

1 926 634 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant, sessile bacterial communities that occupy most moist surfaces on Earth and represent a major mode of bacterial life. Another common feature of bacterial life is exposure to viral parasites (termed phages), which are a dominant force in bacterial population control throughout nature. Surprisingly, almost nothing is known about the interactions between biofilm-dwelling bacteria and phages. This proposal is designed to fill this gap using a combination of novel methodology, experimental systems, and mathematical modeling. We have recently developed a new microscopic imaging technique that allows us to image and track all individual cells and their gene expression inside biofilms. First, we will use this technique for tracking the population dynamics of bacteria and phages within biofilms at single cell resolution. By genetically manipulating bacterial hosts and their phages, and by varying environmental conditions, we will investigate the fundamental biological and physical determinants of phage spread within biofilm communities. Second, we will study how biofilms respond to phage attack on both intra-generational and evolutionary time scales, focusing in particular on proximate response mechanisms and the population dynamics of phage-resistant and phage-susceptible cells as a function of biofilm spatial structure. Lastly, we will combine our novel insights to engineer phages that manipulate the composition of biofilm communities, either by subtraction of particular bacterial species or by addition of novel phenotypes to existing biofilm community members. Altogether, the proposed research promises to uncover the major mechanistic and evolutionary elements of biofilm-phage interactions. This combined work will greatly enrich our knowledge of microbial ecology and motivate novel strategies for bacterial biofilm control, an increasingly urgent priority in light of widespread antibiotic resistance.

1 494 963 €

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

While the crisis of the territorial nation-state in the Middle East has once again been brought to a head by the wars in Iraq and Syria, it cannot be simply understood as the logical consequence of an imported political construction. Based on two epistemological notions – borderlands as histoire-problème (history-as-problem) and the co-production of borders between state and society – this research project proposes to rethink the classical historical narrative about the emergence of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Taking its cue from trans-border phenomena and thus paying attention to the circulation of people, goods and ideas as well as to everyday encounters between local actors and state representatives, the project will be guided by four principle objectives to offer: • A socio-historical analysis of state violence in the borderlands of the Middle East; • An examination of the capacity of border populations to create the history of the borderlands, nation-states, and the region as a whole; • A study of the frontier effects based around the notions of subjectivity, space and time, and involving various levels of observation (macro, meso and micro) in order to identify the ruptures and continuities evoked by the delineation of new borderlines; and • A historical lens through which to make sense of current events in Syria and Iraq, and possibly orient conflict-resolution practitioners. Through the exploitation of a wide range of sources (diplomatic, administrative and military records, missionary documents, newspapers) and by looking at the social construction of international frontiers at the borderlands located between Turkey, Iraq and Syria in the interwar era, the research project will provide a much more holistic yet finely-grained understanding of the formation of the territorial state in the region in the aftermath of the First World War as well as a historical perspective on the on-going armed conflicts.

1 997 675 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

To successfully complete secondary education, persistent learning behavior is essential. Why are some adolescents more resilient to setbacks at school than others? In addition to actual ability, students’ implicit beliefs about the nature of their abilities have major impact on their motivation and achievements. Ability beliefs range from viewing abilities as “entities” that cannot be improved much by effort (entity beliefs), to believing that they are incremental with effort and time (incremental beliefs). Importantly, ability beliefs shape which goals a student pursues at school; proving themselves (performance goals) or improving themselves (learning goals). The central aims of the proposal are to unravel 1) the underlying processing mechanisms of how beliefs and goals shape resilience to setbacks at school and 2) how to influence these mechanisms to stimulate persistent learning behavior. Functional brain research, including my own, has revealed the profound top-down influence of goals on selective information processing. Goals may thus determine which learning-related information is attended. Project 1 jointly investigates the essential psychological and neurobiological processes to unravel the longitudinal effects of beliefs and goals on how the brain prioritizes information during learning, and how this relates to school outcomes. Project 2 reveals how to influence this interplay with the aim to long-lastingly stimulate persistent learning behavior. I will move beyond existing approaches by introducing a novel intervention in which students experience their own learning-related brain activity and its malleability. The results will demonstrate how ability beliefs and goals shape functional brain development and school outcomes during adolescence, and how we can optimally stimulate this interplay. The research has high scientific impact as it bridges multiple disciplines and thereby provides a strong impulse to the emerging field of educational neuroscience.

1 597 291 €

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

This project is an interdisciplinary study of the role of indigenous knowledge in the making of science. Situated at the intersection of history and anthropology, its main research objective is to understand the transformation of information and practices of South American indigenous peoples into a body of knowledge that became part of the Western scholarly canon. It aims to explore, by means of a distinctive case-study, how European science is constructed in intercultural settings. This project takes the book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (HNB), published in 1648 by Piso and Marcgraf, as its central focus. The HNB is the first product of the encounter between early modern European scholarship and South American indigenous knowledge. In an encyclopedic format, it brings together information about the natural world, linguistics, and geography of South America as understood and experienced by indigenous peoples as well as enslaved Africans. Its method of construction embodies the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial settings across the globe, and is the earliest example of such in South America. With my research team, I will investigate how indigenous knowledge was appropriated and transformed into European science by focusing on ethnobotanics, ethnozoology, and indigenous material culture. Since the HNB and its associated materials are kept in European museums and archives, this project is timely and relevant in light of the growing concern for the democratization of heritage. The current debate about the societal role of publicly-funded cultural institutions across Europe argues for the importance of multi-vocality in cultural and political processes. This project proposes a more inclusive interpretation and use of the materials in these institutions and thereby sets an example of how European heritage institutions can use their historical collections to reconnect the past with present-day societal concerns.

1 475 565 €

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