The ESSA project will challenge the Egyptological scholarly narrative that has for centuries contextualised ancient Egypt in relation to the Mediterranean and the Near East and simultaneously overlooked its position on the African continent, minimising its relations with sub-Saharan cultures. This transformative objective will be achieved with the creation of a catalogue of motifs, symbols, and cultural traits shared by several ancient cultures. By presenting the key elements of cultural exchange, the project aims to disrupt traditional perspectives of Egyptology. The ESSA will adopt a diachronic approach and systematically examine different phases of the relations, which will allow for a nuanced evaluation of changes and/or continuity of cultural values over time. Moreover, it will delve into how these cultural shifts relate to the prevailing political dynamics of each period. The overarching goal of the ESSA project is to recontextualise ancient Egyptian civilisation, not only in relation to other African cultures but will instead, reposition it as an integral part of the African continent.

MEGAMAPS aims to produce a transnational in-depth study on Artivism for gender equality in the Mediterranean Arab public space after the 2011 uprisings, by using an interdisciplinary novel methodology, where History and Social Movements Theory intersect Gender studies, Visual Arts and Digital Humanities. By focusing on 4 countries (Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia) the project aims to innovate the global academic knowledge on the Arab region by the writing of an unprecedented history from below which investigates the interplay between gender, public aesthetic dissent and social change. Based on fieldwork and digital ethnography, MEGAMAPS aims to frame, explore and map emerging Artivism for gender equality, conceived as a political incubator which revitalizes an egalitarian project of society in the post-2011 authoritarian ebb. In addition to academic publications, the project aims at producing the first open access and participative digital platform which will consistently document, systematize and interconnect a corpus of living sources (visual and performative arts, oral interviews, and cartographies, maps, graphic tools) and will: a) innovate the traditional approaches of History and Social Movements Theory on the Arab region; b) provide the first research platform dealing with Artivism, gender and social change in the Arab region; c) make this corpus FAIRly accessible to academics, stakeholders and to the general public. MEGAMAPS also involves a set of dissemination activities aimed to improve activists’ participation in a transnational network of artists, researchers, policy-makers and civil society stakeholders in order to promote mutual exchanges of best practices in the field of gender equality, arts and democratic governance, and to contribute in reversing the victimization paradigm on women and sexual minorities in the Arab region by proposing an agency paradigm, which can also overcome orientalism and islamophobia within the Western public opinion.

ELAMortuary is an innovative multidisciplinary project combining archaeology, philology and social theory with digital technology to map long timescale social change in the ancient Near Eastern civilisation of Elam through the lens of its mortuary record. It capitalises on a rare opportunity to track developments across pivotal moments in human history through an uninterrupted sequence of mortuary evidence from small village communities (ca. 4500 BCE) to the rise of the Persian Empire (ca. 525 BCE) at a single site, the gargantuan settlement mound of Susa on the Susiana plain, which flanked lower Mesopotamia—the so-called “Cradle of Civilisation”. Its inhabitants travelled along a similar general trajectory to their Mesopotamian neighbours, from villages, to cities, to states, to empires. The project prioritises a longue durée historical view that seeks long-term patterns in societies and it re-evaluates, through a theoretical interrogation of mortuary data, the validity of the still-dominant linear model of social evolution in ancient southwest Iran. In ELAMortuary praxis, theory, acquisition of skills through advanced training, and a strong partnership come together in a high impact project that will generate an open access database with a new set of archaeological and textual data, and a model for analysing it. This timely new approach to archaeological research is now conceivable thanks to the availability of a rich corpus of data, the digital tools to analyse it, and a solid support network of European researchers. ELAMortuary will deliver a body of new evidence that can be exploited by other researchers of ancient Iran and neighbouring regions of the Near East, and it will present a method and case study for assessing long-scale social change through mortuary evidence to the broader archaeological community. Related disciplines and general audiences will benefit from a new contribution to the knowledge base on past human behaviour around death.

This project aims at examining the impact of the spread of the Śaiva religion on the formation of regional religious identities in South Asia from the Middle Ages to premodern times. In order to tackle this issue, the Principal Investigator and her team will examine the historical evidence connected with a still little studied but highly influential tradition of Sanskrit texts collectively called “Śivadharma” (= “Śaiva Religion”), which have been transmitted in some of the most representative regions of South Asia to exhibit the continuing influence of Śavisim. The impact of this literature can be traced in multiple literary, epigraphical and iconographic sources, making it particularly suitable for a multidisciplinary study in which the analysis and edition of texts goes hand in hand with that of the inscriptions and archaeological context. The regions that will be considered for this project are: Nepal, the Deccan area (with connections to the Andhra coast), the northeastern area of the Bay of Bengal (present-day West Bengal and Odisha), Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The Śivadharma texts, composed around the 6th to 7th century, are mostly related to the institutional and cultural facets of lay religion, thus offering access to information on the material and practical aspects of Śaivism at a time corresponding to its rise to monarchical patronage in South and Southeast Asia. The main focus of the team’s research will be on the process of how these texts were adapted to the different regional contexts in which they are transmitted, as well as the assessment of the impact that their knowledge had on the formation of local Śaivism. We will thus study the manuscript transmission of the texts, along with the texts themselves in their regional variants; translations and commentaries on the texts in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages; and the inscriptions and icons of religious centers that are linked to the texts and the religious current sponsoring them.