̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Christos Lynteris

Celebrating 10 years of European research excellence

ag236 — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:40:43 +0000

When European government representatives met in Lisbon in the year 2000, and expressed an aspiration that Europe should become the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, they agreed on the need to create a body to “fund and co-ordinate basic research at European level”.

This was the impetus underlying the creation, in 2007, of the European Research Council (ERC).

Ten years after its foundation, the ERC has become a European success story. It has supported some 6,500 projects through its prestigious grants, and has become a unique model for the fostering and funding of innovative academic research.

To mark the anniversary, events are being held across Europe during ERC Week, running from 13-19 March. At the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, various recipients of ERC grants will be sharing their findings with a wide audience in talks scheduled as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

̽��ֱ��McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research will be joining in ERC Week celebrations by hosting a conference on Thursday, 16 March.

On the same day, a reception for Cambridge recipients of ERC grants, attended by ERC president Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, will be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is currently showing the ERC-supported exhibition, “Madonnas and Miracles: ̽��ֱ��Holy Home in Renaissance Italy”.

̽��ֱ��ERC supports outstanding researchers in all fields of science and scholarship. It awards three types of research awards (Starter, Consolidator, Advanced) through a competitive, peer-reviewed process that rewards excellence. Its focus on “frontier research” allows academics to develop innovative and far-reaching projects over five-year periods.

̽��ֱ��United Kingdom has been the largest recipient of ERC awards –between 2007 and 2015, it received 24% of all ERC funding.

To date, the ERC has supported 1524 projects by UK-based academics. Researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won 218 of those grants, in fields ranging from Astronomy to Zoology.

“What is special about an ERC grant?”, asks Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, who was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for her project “IN-AFRICA”, which examines the evolution of modern humans in East Africa.

“An obvious side is that it’s a lot of money. But I think it’s more than just the money. Because it’s five years, the ERC grant allows you to get a group and build a real community around the project. It also allows you to explore things in greater depth.”

An ERC grant allowed Dr Debora Sijacki, at the Institute of Astronomy, to attract “a really competitive and international team, which otherwise would have been almost impossible to get.”

Being funded for a five-year period, she adds, “gives you time to expand and really tackle some of the major problems in astrophysics, rather than doing incremental research.”

It also allowed her access to facilities: “In my case, it was access to world-leading supercomputers. And without the ERC grant this would have been difficult.”

“Real progress in research is made when researchers can tackle big important questions," says Prof David Baulcombe, of the Department of Plant Sciences, the recipient of two ERC grants. " ̽��ֱ��ERC programme invites researchers to submit ambitious, blue-skies, imaginative proposals. There aren’t many others sources of funding that allow one to do that sort a thing.”

Dr Christos Lynteris, of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Visual representations of the third plague pandemic.

“An ERC is a unique opportunity," he says: “it fosters interdisciplinary work. It also fosters analytical tools and the creation of new methods.”

“It offers a great opportunity to work with other people, over a period of 5 years, which is something very unusual, and with quite a liberal framework, so you are able to change and shift your questions, to reformulate them. For me, it means freedom, above everything.”

For Prof. Ottoline Leyser, Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, it is the “ERC ethos” and its “emphasis on taking things in new directions” that has made all the difference.

̽��ֱ��ERC values an innovative, risk-taking approach “in a way that conventional grant-funding schemes don’t –they usually want to see that slow build rather than the risky step into the unknown.”

Prof. Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH, was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for his project “Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture”. It has given him “the unique opportunity to do a genuinely interdisciplinary collaborative project with the time and space it takes to make such interdisciplinarity work.”

“Most importantly,” he adds, “the financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world, and Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.”

̽��ֱ��sentiment is echoed by Prof. Ruth Cameron, of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. ̽��ֱ��impact of an ERC grant for her project “3D Engineered Environments for Regenerative Medicine” has, she says, “exceeded expectations”.

So what has the ERC ever done for us? Quite a lot, say Cambridge academics, as they mark the 10th anniversary of Europe’s premier research-funding body

̽��ֱ��financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.

Prof. Simon Goldhill, CRASSH

Cambridge & the ERC: 10 years of research excellence

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Visions of plague

fpjl2 — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 13:22:25 +0000

We are in the midst of the worst Ebola outbreak known in human history. Our screens are filled with nightmarish yet strangely familiar imagery. Men in space-age protective suits, lugging wrapped-up bodies over to hastily dug pits. Clinical tents in poor yet exotic locations, gleaming incongruously. Bodies in the streets.

As Ebola continues its trail of death and terror, many will be unaware that we also continue to live with another killer – plague. ̽��ֱ��most recent pandemic (the third) started in rural China in 1855 but exploded when it reached Hong Kong in 1894, sweeping the world and killing over 12 million people. Although not considered an active threat since 1959, recent cases of plague have occurred in Bolivia, China, Madagascar and the USA.

Dr Christos Lynteris is a social anthropologist based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). During work on plague among marmots on the Chinese–Russian border, Lynteris started to consider how plague is represented, how knowledge about plague is captured and how we interact with what we see when we see the traits of plague.

“ ̽��ֱ��third pandemic was born around the same time as modern photographic techniques, and the ability to capture and transmit images of the third plague pandemic transformed public consciousness. It opened up an era where the meaning of health emergencies is publicly negotiated, rather than predetermined by any single scientific or governmental authority.”

Last year, he was awarded a European Research Council grant to find, collate and analyse the largest database of plague imagery in history; as the only exhaustive visual record of any infectious disease epidemic and its impact on social life and thought in the modern era, it will be an invaluable resource to historians, anthropologists and epidemiologists alike.

Tracking the images down takes painstaking investigative work for Lynteris and his team (Lukas Engelmann, Nick Evans and Branwyn Poleykett), sifting through photographic remnants of the old colonial powers to pick out the diseased, the dying, the depictions of human Yersinia pestis infection. “Many of the images are not held in the places where outbreaks occurred. An archive in Alabama might hold a hundred images of the plague in North China because that’s where the missionaries were from. Foreign doctors, missionaries, reporters from across the world go to other corners of the planet to work with plague epidemics; it can be a tricky web to untangle.”

He describes the imagery as a “strange combination of journalistic war reporting, crime scene photography and medical imagery.” Some of it is so graphic and distressing that part of the grant stipulates the digital archive must be kept in a locked room at all times, the ‘plague room’ as Lynteris cheerfully refers to it. Entering anywhere with such a moniker is slightly unnerving.

“OK, this next one really isn’t very pretty,” said Lynteris, showing one of the thousands of images they have already collected. Lynteris probably says this a lot these days. ̽��ֱ��photo, taken in Madagascar in 1899, feels familiar. ̽��ֱ��tents. ̽��ֱ��pits. ̽��ֱ��suited spacemen. If not for the sepia, this could be West Africa in 2014.

“There is a clear visual paradigm of plague inherited from imperial and colonial history that is emerging as we gather more and more images, an expression of diseased environments we still live with,” explained Lynteris.

“ ̽��ֱ��visual paradigm in the Madagascar photo is replicated throughout the third pandemic and in other outbreaks since, even over a century later, despite the fact that the medical paradigm has completely shifted – we know far more about infectious diseases now than in 1899, so why are we seeing the same imagery? By taking the aesthetic regime from a hundred years ago and replicating it today you are inadvertently replicating a long surpassed medical model.”

Asked whether governments and media are propagating these portrayals because this is what people expect, even need to see, Lynteris said: “I’m not sure, but something is not right here. It’s the components and rationale behind these visual paradigms that we will explore.”

Not all the imagery is gruesome. Some resemble forensic architectural photos. “When the plague hit the USA, investigators would meticulously photograph every house in the infected area – cellars, floors, beams – looking for clues as to the conditions that facilitate plague.”

In another set of images from an outbreak in Manchuria in 1911 that killed 60,000, Lynteris highlights an imperialist propaganda war being fought out in the plague depictions. Russia and China were trying to claim providence of the area, with both determined to prove that it was they who were the most scientific and could tame the plague.

“ ̽��ֱ��Chinese were trying to present an image of high science and hygienic modernity, full of medical teams with microscopes and charts. They depicted plague as an urban planning problem that can be scoured by fire.” There are many pictures of burning houses, but not a single human body.

̽��ֱ��Russians went a different way (“it’s a horror show”). ̽��ֱ��images are entirely militaristic, as if an army invaded a land where everyone was already dead. ̽��ֱ��aim was to show that the Chinese had no control, that death was rife and unstoppable without Russian force: “it was intended to scare, show oriental barbarity with dogs eating corpses and exposed plague pits.” Images like these are why the ‘plague room’ is kept locked.

̽��ֱ��team has had to create a language of plague to make sure the database is fully searchable, and aim to have it live and open access by the time the project finishes in 2018. They are working not just with other anthropologists and medical historians but with epidemiologists. There are fundamental assumptions about plague that life scientists are starting to question, and these archives may hold clues as to what led to mistaken assumptions in the first place.

Most importantly the team is focusing on the relation between the ethics and aesthetics of plague photography. “ ̽��ֱ��implications of this in the age of social media are immense. How do we capture an outbreak like Ebola with our cameras? How does this reflect our responsibility towards the victims, but also in terms of global health?” It’s alarming, Lynteris says, that there seems to be no difference between how we depict outbreaks today and how we did 100 years ago. “In the post-colonial world epidemic photography is still stubbornly colonial.”

Many of the images mentioned in this article are too gruesome to be displayed here. All inset images credit: Wellcome Trust.

A new research project is compiling the largest database of plague imagery ever amassed, focusing on a pandemic that peaked in the early 20th century and continues to this day.

By taking the aesthetic regime from a hundred years ago and replicating it today you are inadvertently replicating a long surpassed medical model

Christos Lynteris

Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

Encoffining body, Changchun, 1911

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