Professor Tuna Sare Agturk
GP24\100434
'After Rome, before Constantinople: Revealing the Late Roman Capital City of Nicomedia'
University of Oxford
£898,816.44
The İzmit-Türkiye earthquake not only claimed thousands of lives but also exposed the remains of ancient Nicomedia, the Roman imperial capital before Constantinople. This project stems from the groundbreaking discovery of Emperor Diocletian's palace complex, revealed beneath modern ruins during post-earthquake excavations in İzmit. These well-preserved structures, complete with painted statues, reliefs, and architectural elements, provide unprecedented insights into Nicomedia, a crucial but overlooked successor to Rome. Threatened by modern development and seismic risks, these discoveries require urgent documentation and preservation. By contextualising Nicomedia within Late Roman visual culture and comparing it with other imperial-centres, this project uncovers its role in shaping the art and architecture of Late Antiquity. Employing advanced digital-mapping, heritage-science, and archaeology, the project protects Nicomedia’s endangered heritage, reshapes our understanding of Roman history, and pioneers new approaches to post-disaster urban archaeology, illustrating both the resilience of ancient cities and the critical need for innovative heritage preservation.
Professor Nafisa Mohamed Bedri
GP24\100408
'Gendering Resilience in the Wars of Sudan and South Sudan'
University of Portsmouth
£900,000.00
Conflict disproportionally impacts on women and girls; levels of violence against them spike, including intimate partner violence and harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation. Humanitarian responses to fragility focuses mainly on resilience and livelihood, with less focus on supporting everyday mechanisms and resources, albeit limited, available to women. The project will collect life histories from an intersectional group of women impacted by the wars in Sudan and South Sudan, taking a real time approach in documenting how women and girls are navigating the current conflict in Sudan and the ongoing repercussions of instability and displacement in South Sudan. It aims to piece together a comprehensive political-economy of how gender shapes distinctive strategies of resilience that women draw on while surviving periods of instability and brutality, besides reflecting best and safe research methods in high risk contexts, giving visibility and voice for those most marginalised by conflict.
Professor Quentin Deluermoz
GP24\100463
'Rethinking Nineteenth-Century European Modernities'
University of Cambridge
£891,157.00
This project develops a history of nineteenth-century European societies that breaks away from the grand narrative of modernisation, and rethinks how we integrate “Europe,” understood in the multiplicity of its territories, within the global history of the century. It develops a new relational and comprehensive methodological framework, at the crossroads of history and the social sciences to analyse social change from a multiscalar and polycentric perspective. Two complementary studies will be conducted: one, rural and environmental, focussing on village life in France and Algeria ; the other, urban and political, on the worldwide resonances of the “Commune form” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project proposes a new methodology for analysing the foundational processes and categories that were forged at that time (state and democracy, nature and culture). Offering a renewed understanding of this period will ultimately help provide new insights into contemporary crises.
Professor Ahmed El Antably
GP24\100218
'Nubian Chronicles: Amplifying Marginalised Voices and Contested Histories through Digital Heritage Reconstruction'
University of York
£875,449.00
This project proposes an innovative approach to reconstruct and preserve the lost cultural landscape of Lower Nubia, submerged by the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. It uses cutting-edge virtual heritage technologies to create an immersive, interactive digital reconstruction of Nubian villages and their surrounding environment. It critically employs Gen-AI to develop AI agents representing key Nubian characters, enabling users to engage in conversations that uncover suppressed narratives and collective memories, and provide unique insights into Nubian daily life, architectural practices, and cultural traditions. Theoretically, the project builds on Pierre Nora's ‘Les lieux de mémoire’, while methodologically, it focuses on oral histories and integrates historical research and archival materials with advanced computational methods to address critical gaps in the current understanding of Nubian heritage. This research will serve as a model for studying climate-threatened heritage sites and exploring the complex interplay between place, identity, history and memory in border regions.
Professor Sian Halcrow
GP24\100483
'Skeletons in the Closet: The bioethics of the use, curation, and repatriation of anatomical skeletal legacy collections in Britain'
Durham University
£899,354.84
Using a multi-facetted, interdisciplinary approach pioneered by the applicant in her groundbreaking work on the bioarchaeology of social justice, this project develops the first state-of-the-art, ethical understanding of historical anatomical skeletal collections in Britain. By investigating and establishing the scope, provenance and bioarcheological composition of collections held across Britain in regional museums, and universities, the controversies of extractive past acquisition practices of human remains will be forefronted and their disproportionate effect on the marginalised in society: the poor and working class, women, children, the enslaved and those under colonial rule. Through partnership with diverse stakeholders, the project will develop the first socially informed guidelines, which could revolutionise how institutions handle human remains, leading to more respectful and equitable practices. In doing so, this project will contribute to the international discourse on the ethical management of human remains and foster greater public awareness and understanding through outreach.
Professor Claire Kilpatrick
GP24\100134
'The EU’s new frontiers of human rights at work: exploring and assessing how the EU uses international human and labour rights to address green, trade and supply-chain concerns'
Queen’s University Belfast
£891,157.00
This project focuses on an exciting and consequential set of legal sources in EU law which are concerned with market regulation for goods, services and commodities. From forced labour to deforestation, from critical raw materials and batteries, and from fishing to corporate sustainability, these new sources are important for labour rights, human rights and environmental protection. The project’s focus is on labour rights which remain a profoundly underexplored element of these sources. The instruments discussed will impact greatly on the EU’s trading partners including the UK and, within that, Northern Ireland. This project will analyse the implications of this novel embedding of international labour and human rights in EU market regulation sources, both for people working within the EU and for people working abroad. It will address questions of regulatory design and regulatory impact, as well as evaluating EU legitimacy and accountability in the labour dimension of these measures.
Dr Marsha Pearce
GP24\1001478
'Trembling Abode: Reimagining the Museum as Home for Global Majority Artists'
University of Cambridge
£881,950.00
Considering issues of belonging and agency, this phenomenographic research will ask: what makes a museum a home? Amid calls for restorative justice, museums are experiencing an identity crisis as they reckon with their colonial past: are museums houses of objects, or spaces attending to social matters? The project nurtures academic and creative relationships between the UK and Caribbean, exploring homemaking in relation to Global Majority artists, not afforded equal voice and place in major cultural institutions. I deploy Glissant’s “tremble thinking” and Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” as conceptual modes for reimagining traditional museology. The Fitzwilliam Museum, part of the 800-year-old University of Cambridge, will be the first major UK collection to be trembled beyond exhibition making. Caribbean-rooted philosophies will be applied across four research pillars: acquisitions, artist residencies, curation and public engagement. Addressing these areas together positions this Professorship to engender and inform truly transformative remodellings of museum practice.
Professor Rosemary Jane Stamp
GP24\100330
'Language evolution and sociolinguistic variation in signing communities'
University of Birmingham
£897,409.01
Sign languages offer us a unique opportunity to understand the beginnings of language and to predict the future of language evolution. Drawing on Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, this project examines linguistic evolution by looking at the full life cycle of sign languages (from language emergence to language shift to another more dominant variety) for the first time. Taking three sign languages at different stages in their life cycles: ‘emerging’ Israeli Sign Language, ‘established’ British Sign Language, and ‘(e)merging’ Kufr Qassem Sign Language, this project examines variation at different stages of the language lifecycle (Study 1), explores the selection pressures on lexical variant ‘survival’ (Study 2), and investigates how social networks affect the transmission of variants across different linguistic communities. This time-sensitive project provides substantial input in understanding the causes of language variation and change, and the importance of future societal changes on language evolution.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.