Project acronym CULTURECONTACT
Project Europe and America in contact: a multidisciplinary study of cross-cultural transfer in the New World across time
Researcher (PI) Justyna Agnieszka Olko
Host Institution (HI) UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary "At the core of this research proposal is the aim of reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of this project is to study this process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends. The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in language, studied systematically through the creation of extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments, becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world, where the change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life and beyond."
Summary
"At the core of this research proposal is the aim of reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of this project is to study this process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends. The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in language, studied systematically through the creation of extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments, becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world, where the change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life and beyond."
Max ERC Funding
1 318 840 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30
Project acronym IMMOCAP
Project 'If immortality unveil…'– development of the novel types of energy storage systems with excellent long-term performance
Researcher (PI) Krzysztof FIC
Host Institution (HI) POLITECHNIKA POZNANSKA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE8, ERC-2017-STG
Summary The major goal of the project is to develop a novel type of an electrochemical capacitor with high specific power (up to 5 kW/kg) and energy (up to 20 Wh/kg) preserved along at least 50 000 cycles. Thus, completion of the project will result in remarkable enhancement of specific energy, power and life time of modern electrochemical capacitors. Advanced electrochemical testing (galvanostatic cycling with constant power loads, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, accelerated aging and kinetic tests) will be accompanied by materials design and detailed characterization. Moreover, the project aims at the implementation of novel concepts of the electrolytes and designing of new operando technique for capacitor characterization. All these efforts aim at the development of sustainable and efficient energy conversion and storage system.
Summary
The major goal of the project is to develop a novel type of an electrochemical capacitor with high specific power (up to 5 kW/kg) and energy (up to 20 Wh/kg) preserved along at least 50 000 cycles. Thus, completion of the project will result in remarkable enhancement of specific energy, power and life time of modern electrochemical capacitors. Advanced electrochemical testing (galvanostatic cycling with constant power loads, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, accelerated aging and kinetic tests) will be accompanied by materials design and detailed characterization. Moreover, the project aims at the implementation of novel concepts of the electrolytes and designing of new operando technique for capacitor characterization. All these efforts aim at the development of sustainable and efficient energy conversion and storage system.
Max ERC Funding
1 385 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30
Project acronym UMMA
Project Urban Metamorphosis of the community of a Medieval African capital city
Researcher (PI) Artur OBLUSKI
Host Institution (HI) UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2017-STG
Summary UMMA (Arab. أمة - community) is a multidisciplinary project aimed as the first study of the liminal phases of a Christian African community inhabiting Dongola, the capital city of of Makuria (modern Sudan). It will concern the twilight of Christian Dongola and the metamorphosis of its urban community into a new entity organised along different social and religious paradigms. The project will investigate the impact between the weakening of the central authority and migrations of Islamic Arab tribes on the kingdom’s capital city and its community. The notion that the project intends to investigate is that a complete breakdown of this urban organism and its hinterland was avoided thanks to cooperation established between the remaining local community and migrant population groups arriving in the period under consideration. The project will seek to identify strategies of
interaction between the local community and the newcomers, as well as patterns of survival of the old traditions on household level. UMMA will lay foundations for further enquiries into evolution of precolonial African communities and provoke a general discussion on social changes in urban environments. It will unfold a whole new research perspective on the period from the gradual decline of the kingdom of Makuria (14th-15th cent. CE) to the Egyptian invasion in 1820, which is virtually absent from scholarly enquiry to date.
UMMA brings together specialists from several disciplines to carry out an exemplary archaeological project to set the standards for future archaeological research on late medieval and early modern Sudan. The project will combine methods of inquiry used in disciplines like history, archaeology, geophysics, chemistry and physics to obtain a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary perspective on the social phenomenon of liminal periods in urbanism.
Summary
UMMA (Arab. أمة - community) is a multidisciplinary project aimed as the first study of the liminal phases of a Christian African community inhabiting Dongola, the capital city of of Makuria (modern Sudan). It will concern the twilight of Christian Dongola and the metamorphosis of its urban community into a new entity organised along different social and religious paradigms. The project will investigate the impact between the weakening of the central authority and migrations of Islamic Arab tribes on the kingdom’s capital city and its community. The notion that the project intends to investigate is that a complete breakdown of this urban organism and its hinterland was avoided thanks to cooperation established between the remaining local community and migrant population groups arriving in the period under consideration. The project will seek to identify strategies of
interaction between the local community and the newcomers, as well as patterns of survival of the old traditions on household level. UMMA will lay foundations for further enquiries into evolution of precolonial African communities and provoke a general discussion on social changes in urban environments. It will unfold a whole new research perspective on the period from the gradual decline of the kingdom of Makuria (14th-15th cent. CE) to the Egyptian invasion in 1820, which is virtually absent from scholarly enquiry to date.
UMMA brings together specialists from several disciplines to carry out an exemplary archaeological project to set the standards for future archaeological research on late medieval and early modern Sudan. The project will combine methods of inquiry used in disciplines like history, archaeology, geophysics, chemistry and physics to obtain a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary perspective on the social phenomenon of liminal periods in urbanism.
Max ERC Funding
1 484 854 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31
