ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The spread of farming practices in various parts of the world had a marked influence on how humans live today and how we are distributed around the globe. Around 10,000 years ago, warmer conditions lead to population increases, coinciding with the invention of farming in several places around the world. Archaeological evidence attest to the spread of these practices to neighboring regions. In many cases this lead to whole continents being converted from hunter-gatherer to farming societies. It is however difficult to see from archaeological records if only the farming culture spread to other places or whether the farming people themselves migrated. Investigating patterns of genetic variation for farming populations and for remaining hunter-gatherer groups can help to resolve questions on population movements co-occurring with the spread of farming practices. It can further shed light on the routes of migration and dates when migrants arrived. The spread of farming to Europe has been thoroughly investigated in the fields of archaeology, linguistics and genetics, while on other continents these events have been less investigated. In Africa, mainly linguistic and archaeological studies have attempted to elucidate the spread of farming and herding practices. I propose to investigate the movement of farmer and pastoral groups in Africa, by typing densely spaced genome-wide variant positions in a large number of African populations. The data will be used to infer how farming and pastoralism was introduced to various regions, where the incoming people originated from and when these (potential) population movements occurred. Through this study, the Holocene history of Africa will be revealed and placed into a global context of migration, mobility and cultural transitions. Additionally the study will give due credence to one of the largest Neolithic expansion events, the Bantu-expansion, which caused a pronounced change in the demographic landscape of the African continent

1 500 000 €

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

GLOBEGOVE is a historical study of humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints and how it has become understood as a governance issue. The key argument is that Global Environmental Governance (GEG), which has arisen in response to this issue, is inseparable from the rise of a planetary Earth systems science and a knowledge-informed understanding of global change that has affected broad communities of practice. The overarching objective is to provide a fundamentally new perspective on GEG that challenges both previous linear, progressivist narratives through incremental institutional work and the way contemporary history is written and understood. GLOBEGOVE will be implemented as an expressly global history along four Trajectories, which will ensure both transnational as well as transdisciplinary analysis of GEG as a major contemporary phenomenon. Trajectory I: Formation articulates a proto-history of GEG after 1945 when the concept of ‘the environment’ in its new integrative meaning was established and a slow formation of policy ideas and institutions could start. Trajectory II: The complicated turning of environmental research into governance investigates the relation between environmental science and environmental governance which GLOBEGOV examines as an open ended historical process. Why was it that high politics and diplomacy came in closer relations with environmental sciences? Trajectory III: Alternative agencies – governance through business and civic society explores corporate responses, including self-regulation through the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, to growing concerns about environmental degradation and pollution, and business-science relations. Trajectory IV: Integrating Earth into History – scaling, mediating, remembering will turn to historiography itself and examine how concepts and ideas from the rising Earth system sciences have been influencing both GEG and the way we think historically about Earth and humanity.

2 500 000 €

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

The proposal describes two main projects. Both of them concern cohomology of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, but the aims are rather different. The first is a natural continuation of my work on tautological rings, which I intend to work on with Qizheng Yin and Mehdi Tavakol. In this project, we will introduce a new perspective on tautological rings, which is that the tautological cohomology of moduli spaces of pointed Riemann surfaces can be described in terms of tautological cohomology of the moduli space M_g, but with twisted coefficients. In the cases we have been able to compute so far, the tautological cohomology with twisted coefficients is always much simpler to understand, even though it “contains the same information”. In particular we hope to be able to find a systematic way of analyzing the consequences of the recent conjecture that Pixton’s relations are all relations between tautological classes; until now, most concrete consequences of Pixton’s conjecture have been found via extensive computer calculations, which are feasible only when the genus and number of markings is small. The second project has a somewhat different flavor, involving operads and periods of moduli spaces, and builds upon recent work of myself with Johan Alm, who I will continue to collaborate with. This work is strongly informed by Brown’s breakthrough results relating mixed motives over Spec(Z) and multiple zeta values to the periods of moduli spaces of genus zero Riemann surfaces. In brief, Brown introduced a partial compactification of the moduli space M_{0,n} of n-pointed genus zero Riemann surfaces; we have shown that the spaces M_{0,n} and these partial compactifications are connected by a form of dihedral Koszul duality. It seems likely that this Koszul duality should have further ramifications in the study of multiple zeta values and periods of these spaces; optimistically, this could lead to new irrationality results for multiple zeta values.

1 091 249 €

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