Project acronym AMBH
Project Ancient Music Beyond Hellenisation
Researcher (PI) Stefan HAGEL
Host Institution (HI) OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary From medieval times, Arabic as well as European music was analysed in terms that were inherited from Classical Antiquity and had thus developed in a very different music culture. In spite of recent breakthroughs in the understanding of the latter, whose technicalities we access not only through texts and iconography, but also through instrument finds and surviving notated melodies, its relation to music traditions known from later periods and different places is almost uncharted territory.
The present project explores relations between Hellenic/Hellenistic music as pervaded the theatres and concert halls throughout and beyond the Roman empire, Near Eastern traditions – from the diatonic system emerging from cuneiform sources to the flourishing musical world of the caliphates – and, as far as possible, African musical life south of Egypt as well – a region that maintained close ties both with the Hellenised culture of its northern neighbours and with the Arabian Peninsula.
On the one hand, this demands collaboration between Classical Philology and Arabic Studies, extending methods recently developed within music archaeological research related to the Classical Mediterranean. Arabic writings need to be examined in close reading, using recent insights into the interplay between ancient music theory and practice, in order to segregate the influence of Greek thinking from ideas and facts that must relate to contemporaneous ‘Arabic’ music-making. In this way we hope better to define the relation of this tradition to the ‘Classical world’, potentially breaking free of Orientalising bias informing modern views. On the other hand, the study and reconstruction, virtual and material, of wind instruments of Hellenistic pedigree but found outside the confinements of the Hellenistic ‘heartlands’ may provide evidence of ‘foreign’ tonality employed in those regions – specifically the royal city of Meroë in modern Sudan and the Oxus Temple in modern Tajikistan.
Summary
From medieval times, Arabic as well as European music was analysed in terms that were inherited from Classical Antiquity and had thus developed in a very different music culture. In spite of recent breakthroughs in the understanding of the latter, whose technicalities we access not only through texts and iconography, but also through instrument finds and surviving notated melodies, its relation to music traditions known from later periods and different places is almost uncharted territory.
The present project explores relations between Hellenic/Hellenistic music as pervaded the theatres and concert halls throughout and beyond the Roman empire, Near Eastern traditions – from the diatonic system emerging from cuneiform sources to the flourishing musical world of the caliphates – and, as far as possible, African musical life south of Egypt as well – a region that maintained close ties both with the Hellenised culture of its northern neighbours and with the Arabian Peninsula.
On the one hand, this demands collaboration between Classical Philology and Arabic Studies, extending methods recently developed within music archaeological research related to the Classical Mediterranean. Arabic writings need to be examined in close reading, using recent insights into the interplay between ancient music theory and practice, in order to segregate the influence of Greek thinking from ideas and facts that must relate to contemporaneous ‘Arabic’ music-making. In this way we hope better to define the relation of this tradition to the ‘Classical world’, potentially breaking free of Orientalising bias informing modern views. On the other hand, the study and reconstruction, virtual and material, of wind instruments of Hellenistic pedigree but found outside the confinements of the Hellenistic ‘heartlands’ may provide evidence of ‘foreign’ tonality employed in those regions – specifically the royal city of Meroë in modern Sudan and the Oxus Temple in modern Tajikistan.
Max ERC Funding
775 959 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31
Project acronym CALLIOPE
Project voCAL articuLations Of Parliamentary Identity and Empire
Researcher (PI) Josephine HOEGAERTS
Host Institution (HI) HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary What did politicians sound like before they were on the radio and television? The fascination with politicians’ vocal characteristics and quirks is often connected to the rise of audio-visual media. But in the age of the printed press, political representatives also had to ‘speak well’ – without recourse to amplification.
Historians and linguists have provided sophisticated understandings of the discursive and aesthetic aspects of politicians’ language, but have largely ignored the importance of the acoustic character of their speech. CALLIOPE studies how vocal performances in parliament have influenced the course of political careers and political decision making in the 19th century. It shows how politicians’ voices helped to define the diverse identities they articulated. In viewing parliament through the lens of audibility, the project offers a new perspective on political representation by reframing how authority was embodied (through performances that were heard, rather than seen). It does so for the Second Chamber in Britain and France, and in dialogue with ‘colonial’ modes of speech in Kolkata and Algiers, which, we argue, exerted considerable influence on European vocal culture.
The project devises an innovative methodological approach to include the sound of the human voice in studies of the past that precede acoustic recording. Adapting methods developed in sound studies and combining them with the tools of political history, the project proposes a new way to analyse parliamentary reporting, while also drawing on a variety of sources that are rarely connected to the history of politics.
The main source material for the study comprise transcripts of parliamentary speech (official reports and renditions by journalists). However, the project also mobilizes educational, satirical and fictional sources to elucidate the convoluted processes that led to the cultivation, exertion, reception and evaluation of a voice ‘fit’ for nineteenth-century politics.
Summary
What did politicians sound like before they were on the radio and television? The fascination with politicians’ vocal characteristics and quirks is often connected to the rise of audio-visual media. But in the age of the printed press, political representatives also had to ‘speak well’ – without recourse to amplification.
Historians and linguists have provided sophisticated understandings of the discursive and aesthetic aspects of politicians’ language, but have largely ignored the importance of the acoustic character of their speech. CALLIOPE studies how vocal performances in parliament have influenced the course of political careers and political decision making in the 19th century. It shows how politicians’ voices helped to define the diverse identities they articulated. In viewing parliament through the lens of audibility, the project offers a new perspective on political representation by reframing how authority was embodied (through performances that were heard, rather than seen). It does so for the Second Chamber in Britain and France, and in dialogue with ‘colonial’ modes of speech in Kolkata and Algiers, which, we argue, exerted considerable influence on European vocal culture.
The project devises an innovative methodological approach to include the sound of the human voice in studies of the past that precede acoustic recording. Adapting methods developed in sound studies and combining them with the tools of political history, the project proposes a new way to analyse parliamentary reporting, while also drawing on a variety of sources that are rarely connected to the history of politics.
The main source material for the study comprise transcripts of parliamentary speech (official reports and renditions by journalists). However, the project also mobilizes educational, satirical and fictional sources to elucidate the convoluted processes that led to the cultivation, exertion, reception and evaluation of a voice ‘fit’ for nineteenth-century politics.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 905 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28
Project acronym GMM
Project Globalized Memorial Museums.Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals
Researcher (PI) Ljiljana Radonic
Host Institution (HI) OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2018-COG
Summary The ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ has established the Shoah as an historical reference point legitimizing a global moral imperative to respect human rights. Much has been written about the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’, but as yet no genuinely global comparative study systematically confronting this hypothesis with the actual representations of atrocities exists. GMM breaks new ground by examining memorial museums on four continents, arguing that what is called ‘globalization’ in fact comprises three to some degree contradictory trends:
1) The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem are role models for a universal moral orientation that focuses on the individual victim and generates aesthetic ‘standards’ for musealization.
2) The German concept of negative memory, self-critically confronting the crimes committed by her own population, has inspired museums to tackle the question of one’s own complicity in order to challenge collective self-victimization and the externalization of responsibility.
3) The genocides of the 1990s led to a ‘forensic turn’: the investigation of bones & other material evidence of atrocities has changed the way in situ memorial museums deal with material traces of violence. This shift has also impacted ‘old’ memorial sites like Sobibor, which has become a site of archaeological research after 70 years.
GMM examines 50 memorial museums dealing with
- the WWII period in the US, Israel, Europe, China, and Japan;
- recent genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Scholars claim that ‘globalized’ memorial museums reflect new moral standards and a new language of commemoration, but what is the price of the attendant de-contextualization in the name of moral universals? GMM’s wholly original global typology of memorial museums has the potential to act as a genuine game changer that challenges the concept of ‘universal memory’ and the notion that memorial museums constitute a globalized space of communication and negotiation.
Summary
The ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ has established the Shoah as an historical reference point legitimizing a global moral imperative to respect human rights. Much has been written about the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’, but as yet no genuinely global comparative study systematically confronting this hypothesis with the actual representations of atrocities exists. GMM breaks new ground by examining memorial museums on four continents, arguing that what is called ‘globalization’ in fact comprises three to some degree contradictory trends:
1) The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem are role models for a universal moral orientation that focuses on the individual victim and generates aesthetic ‘standards’ for musealization.
2) The German concept of negative memory, self-critically confronting the crimes committed by her own population, has inspired museums to tackle the question of one’s own complicity in order to challenge collective self-victimization and the externalization of responsibility.
3) The genocides of the 1990s led to a ‘forensic turn’: the investigation of bones & other material evidence of atrocities has changed the way in situ memorial museums deal with material traces of violence. This shift has also impacted ‘old’ memorial sites like Sobibor, which has become a site of archaeological research after 70 years.
GMM examines 50 memorial museums dealing with
- the WWII period in the US, Israel, Europe, China, and Japan;
- recent genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Scholars claim that ‘globalized’ memorial museums reflect new moral standards and a new language of commemoration, but what is the price of the attendant de-contextualization in the name of moral universals? GMM’s wholly original global typology of memorial museums has the potential to act as a genuine game changer that challenges the concept of ‘universal memory’ and the notion that memorial museums constitute a globalized space of communication and negotiation.
Max ERC Funding
1 947 514 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31
Project acronym PapyGreek
Project Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri
Researcher (PI) Marja VIERROS
Host Institution (HI) HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary The project creates a new Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. It fills a void in Greek scholarship: the papyrological corpus represents the Post-Classical variety of Greek, a bridge between Classical and Medieval Greek, which has hitherto been very difficult to use as a source for studying historical linguistics. This project will develop new digital methods for studying this fragmentary but vast text corpus.
Greek is a unique language for linguists in its chronological scope. Documentary Greek papyri, ranging from ca. 300 BCE to 700 CE, can be contrasted with literature: these papyri preserve us the language as the ancient writer composed it and lead us close to the colloquial contemporary language. The nonstandard variation in documentary texts is where language change can first be detected, making the papyrological corpus an important source for diachronic study of Greek. The new Grammar of Greek papyri will answer such questions as how much bilingualism affected Greek in Egypt and when and where it was a dominant feature of the society. The papyri will partly be treated as big data; the whole corpus will be morphologically tagged. This will enable e.g. phonological analyses to be performed in greater accuracy than has been possible before through eliminating the confusion between inflectional morphology and phonological variation.
As a result, the Digital Grammar will bring the language used in the Greek papyri openly available to the scholarly community in an unforeseen manner. It will include new, more exact analyses of the phonology and morphology of Greek in Egypt, as well as a possibility to search both phonological and morphological forms, in combination or in separation, in the whole corpus. The syntactically annotated corpora will form a smaller but constantly expanding corpus of selected papyri, which yields to a wider range of searches on morphosyntax.
Summary
The project creates a new Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. It fills a void in Greek scholarship: the papyrological corpus represents the Post-Classical variety of Greek, a bridge between Classical and Medieval Greek, which has hitherto been very difficult to use as a source for studying historical linguistics. This project will develop new digital methods for studying this fragmentary but vast text corpus.
Greek is a unique language for linguists in its chronological scope. Documentary Greek papyri, ranging from ca. 300 BCE to 700 CE, can be contrasted with literature: these papyri preserve us the language as the ancient writer composed it and lead us close to the colloquial contemporary language. The nonstandard variation in documentary texts is where language change can first be detected, making the papyrological corpus an important source for diachronic study of Greek. The new Grammar of Greek papyri will answer such questions as how much bilingualism affected Greek in Egypt and when and where it was a dominant feature of the society. The papyri will partly be treated as big data; the whole corpus will be morphologically tagged. This will enable e.g. phonological analyses to be performed in greater accuracy than has been possible before through eliminating the confusion between inflectional morphology and phonological variation.
As a result, the Digital Grammar will bring the language used in the Greek papyri openly available to the scholarly community in an unforeseen manner. It will include new, more exact analyses of the phonology and morphology of Greek in Egypt, as well as a possibility to search both phonological and morphological forms, in combination or in separation, in the whole corpus. The syntactically annotated corpora will form a smaller but constantly expanding corpus of selected papyri, which yields to a wider range of searches on morphosyntax.
Max ERC Funding
1 495 584 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28
Project acronym PRODUCTION OF WORK
Project The production of work. Welfare, labour-market and the disputed boundaries of labour (1880-1938)
Researcher (PI) Sigrid Wadauer
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2007-StG
Summary Since the late 19th century modern social welfare policy has established social insurances in certain formalized cases of non-work: in case of old age, illness, invalidity, and unemployment. Doing so, it gained importance to control the entitlement to social welfare, national affiliation, willingness or (in-)ability to work. These new regulations of work and non-work also manifested new concepts of work and vocation. Simultaneously and with reference to the new social status of labour and to the new social rights debates on vagrancy, begging and the work-shy relived a new boom. Who should receive help? Who is a threat to the greater public good by refusing labour? Not every way to find income was equally acknowledged as work. There was a variety of activities changeable between work, hunting for a job, non-work, begging and vagrancy. These activities were suspected of being a cover of work-shyness and negative work. Through that they belonged to a disputed sphere at the margins of welfare, labour market and criminality. Within this context unskilled, occasional, seasonal labour were further marginalized and subject of re-definition. The project analyses these disputed boundaries of work. It will focus on Austria 1918-1938, but it aims at an international comparison and will consider relevant developments since the late 19th century, too. The project will study precarious forms of waged labour and non-work within the context of the organisations of labour market, search for employment and job placement. Therefore it is of fundamental importance to include marginal perspectives and practices into the analysis. How did concepts of vocational work and their binding character vary according to age, gender and ethnicity? In which ways were work and non-work defined? How were the distinctions and hierarchies practically implemented? Of particular interest is the tramping of the unemployed and forms of integration, support and control of ramblers being related to it.
Summary
Since the late 19th century modern social welfare policy has established social insurances in certain formalized cases of non-work: in case of old age, illness, invalidity, and unemployment. Doing so, it gained importance to control the entitlement to social welfare, national affiliation, willingness or (in-)ability to work. These new regulations of work and non-work also manifested new concepts of work and vocation. Simultaneously and with reference to the new social status of labour and to the new social rights debates on vagrancy, begging and the work-shy relived a new boom. Who should receive help? Who is a threat to the greater public good by refusing labour? Not every way to find income was equally acknowledged as work. There was a variety of activities changeable between work, hunting for a job, non-work, begging and vagrancy. These activities were suspected of being a cover of work-shyness and negative work. Through that they belonged to a disputed sphere at the margins of welfare, labour market and criminality. Within this context unskilled, occasional, seasonal labour were further marginalized and subject of re-definition. The project analyses these disputed boundaries of work. It will focus on Austria 1918-1938, but it aims at an international comparison and will consider relevant developments since the late 19th century, too. The project will study precarious forms of waged labour and non-work within the context of the organisations of labour market, search for employment and job placement. Therefore it is of fundamental importance to include marginal perspectives and practices into the analysis. How did concepts of vocational work and their binding character vary according to age, gender and ethnicity? In which ways were work and non-work defined? How were the distinctions and hierarchies practically implemented? Of particular interest is the tramping of the unemployed and forms of integration, support and control of ramblers being related to it.
Max ERC Funding
1 372 760 €
Duration
Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2013-09-30
Project acronym THEKAISERSMOSQUES
Project Islamic architecture and Orientalizing style in Habsburg Bosnia, 1878-1918
Researcher (PI) Maximilian HARTMUTH
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary The project highlights a grossly understudied experiment at the intersection of nineteenth-century European and Islamic architectural histories. It draws attention to a significant body of buildings designed by architects trained in Central Europe for use by Muslims in Habsburg-ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878-1918). These buildings, many of which mosques, largely draw upon a traditional Islamic formal and functional typology. The composition and decoration of their facades, however, is the product of nineteenth-century Historicist conduct. Quoted are elements from assorted Islamic artistic heritages, with prominence given to Cairo and Andalusia. In Bosnia, many of these buildings were misinterpreted as mere renovations of Ottoman edifices, as is indeed declared on several inscriptions. However, this information generally appears to pertain to the institutions accommodated in these buildings rather than to their present form and architecture.
The project’s primary intention is to validate the assertion that these buildings must be considered a distinct group of architectural monuments, and that they, in consequence, constitute a phenomenon that necessitates separate appraisal and study. Intertwined with this architectural phenomenon is the stylistic phenomenon traditionally (yet inaccurately) called ‘pseudo-Moorish’ in Bosnia. This Orientalizing style was the preferred choice for buildings constructed for use by Muslims; it is be the project’s second focus of inquiry. The study seeks to explore its historical sources and the channels of their reception, as well as the logic and aesthetic of these sources’ paraphrasing in a nineteenth-century context.
By documenting and analyzing this heritage in the necessary detail, the project fills a significant gap in published scholarly research. It also contributes to our understanding of European powers’ historical responses to the challenge of cultural diversity in territories under their control.
Summary
The project highlights a grossly understudied experiment at the intersection of nineteenth-century European and Islamic architectural histories. It draws attention to a significant body of buildings designed by architects trained in Central Europe for use by Muslims in Habsburg-ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878-1918). These buildings, many of which mosques, largely draw upon a traditional Islamic formal and functional typology. The composition and decoration of their facades, however, is the product of nineteenth-century Historicist conduct. Quoted are elements from assorted Islamic artistic heritages, with prominence given to Cairo and Andalusia. In Bosnia, many of these buildings were misinterpreted as mere renovations of Ottoman edifices, as is indeed declared on several inscriptions. However, this information generally appears to pertain to the institutions accommodated in these buildings rather than to their present form and architecture.
The project’s primary intention is to validate the assertion that these buildings must be considered a distinct group of architectural monuments, and that they, in consequence, constitute a phenomenon that necessitates separate appraisal and study. Intertwined with this architectural phenomenon is the stylistic phenomenon traditionally (yet inaccurately) called ‘pseudo-Moorish’ in Bosnia. This Orientalizing style was the preferred choice for buildings constructed for use by Muslims; it is be the project’s second focus of inquiry. The study seeks to explore its historical sources and the channels of their reception, as well as the logic and aesthetic of these sources’ paraphrasing in a nineteenth-century context.
By documenting and analyzing this heritage in the necessary detail, the project fills a significant gap in published scholarly research. It also contributes to our understanding of European powers’ historical responses to the challenge of cultural diversity in territories under their control.
Max ERC Funding
1 257 973 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31
