Historian Paul van Trigt and Arabist Peter Webb have been awarded Consolidator Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). This grant of up to two million euros will allow them to consolidate their research team or programme.
The Consoidator Grant is for promising researchers with 7-12 years of experience since completing their PhD. They can use to grant of up to two million euros to fund their team of researchers and support staff for a period of five years.
Paul van Trigt - Institute for History
Why do people with intellectual disabilities experience loneliness relatively often, despite advances in their emancipation since the 1960s? Missing from the scientific research on this question are historical studies of the interpersonal (dis)connections between people with and without intellectual disabilities in different parts of the world.
In his DisFriend project, Van Trigt will explore how influential international organisations and communities in different countries, in which people with and without intellectual disabilities have lived and worked together, have shaped friendship as a 'moral good' since the 1960s. By developing an innovative transnational moral-historical approach and analysing unexplored archives and oral-history interviews, this project will enrich the historiography of disability internationalism. DisFriend will open new horizons in the research on loneliness in marginalised groups, beyond national approaches that emphasise vulnerability alone.
Peter Webb - Institute for Area Studies
The Arabian world in which Islam emerged c.600 CE remains mysterious. We still do not grasp the society, politics and beliefs of the first people who became Muslims because they wrote no chronicles nor left detailed inscriptions in stone. Yet the Arabians did have a way to record their history - they composed poetry. Thousands of poems are still preserved, but they are little consulted, in part because of doubts over their authenticity.
Peter Webb's GeoPo project will resolve these doubts. The ancient poets mentioned thousands of places in their poetry, and the great majority of them can still be discovered in Saudi Arabia today. The poetry's geographic accuracy is the key to unlocking poetry's value as a historical source. GeoPo will locate the ancient places, retrace the poets' footsteps and re-read their poems to uncover vital historical information. Funded by the European Research Council and facilitated on the ground with the logistics and permission of the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture, GeoPo pioneers a new way to illuminate Arabia's past.
