Politicians, scholars, and popular writers between 1750 and 1850 routinely characterized South-East-Central Europe as a corrupt political space. A wide range of foreign observers portrayed graft, nepotism, and bribery as endemic. Indigenous critics echoed many of these assessments. Regional insiders and outsiders alike mobilized commentaries on “corruption” for their own political, professional, and personal ends, claiming they could run more honest and efficient administrations, military regimes, and commercial operations than those in power. These notables linked “corruption” to the region’s supposed cultural backwardness and economic under-development. In doing so, public figures naturalized notions of “corruption,” making it appear both widespread and organic in the region—popularizing tropes that have endured right down to the present. Yet, “corruption” is a historically specific concept. TransCorr seeks to construct a history of the idea of “corruption” in Central-South-East Europe in conjunction with the rise of modernity. It demonstrates how in the context of new ideas about modernity emanating from West Europe, regional leaders reframed a host of traditional customs and practices as corrupt. It examines how Great Power attempts to transform these borderlands into formal and informal imperial provinces further entrenched novel understandings of “corruption,” often pejoratively associating them with the Ottoman legacy. By tracing out this history, TransCorr reveals a genealogy of ideas, discourses, and attitudes that continue to inform analyses of and discussions within the region today. The project brings the study of this geographic area into greater dialogue with a global story of modernization and aligns the region’s historiography with new innovations in the scientific literature. It also reframes contemporary debates on patronage and graft and reconfigures broader understandings of centre-periphery relations within the region and across the continent.

• CfA: 4 postdoc positions to work within the ERC research project “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)”, Deadline: 31 October 2024
  Pre-selection results
  Final results
•  CfP: Conceptualizing Corruption: The “Old Regime” and the New Order in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s) | International Conference, 17-18 June 2024, at New Europe College, Bucharest
• CfA: Administrative Assistant within the research project TransCorr – ERC Advanced Grant –
  Pre-selection results
  Pre-selection interview results
  Final results

The EnviroCitizen project brings together seven partners in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Cyprus to uncover the processes by which citizen scientists working in environmental-based activities can strengthen their environmental citizenship. We have selected to study birding activities because they hold great potential for developing environmental citizenship.

We will (1) assess the evolution of citizen involvement in citizen science birding activities; (2) evaluate how citizens learn about and enact environmental citizenship through their citizen science birding activities; and (3) develop innovative community interventions designed to complement existing citizen science birding programs in order to cultivate environmental citizenship in the future.

We will create new knowledge and community interventions in six different languages and cultures across Europe through an ambitious multi-language school-based educational program and public engagement events to both increase participation in existing bird counting activities and raise environmental citizenship as a deliberate outcome of involvement in these activities. We have engaged ornithology non-profit organizations as supporting external groups in the project in order to facilitate the research tasks as well as uptake and impact of the project’s intervention deliverables.

Our project proposes a fragmentary account of the art histories produced in present-day Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia between 1850 and 1950, from an entangled histories perspective. We will look at the relationships between the art histories produced in these countries and the art histories produced in Western Europe. But, more importantly, we will investigate how the art histories written in the countries mentioned above resonate with each other, either proposing conflicting interpretations of the past, or ignoring uncomfortable competing discourses.

We will investigate the art histories written between 1850 and 1950 because we are interested in how art history contributed to nation building discourses. Therefore, we will focus on those art histories that concur to nationalising the past. Our project is articulated around three crucial concepts – periodisation, style and influence – set in the context of relevant contemporary historiographies produced in Western Europe, and analysing the entanglements with competing historiographies in each of the countries considered. We will focus on two main issues:

1. How did Central and Eastern European art historians adopt, adapt and respond to theoretical and methodological issues developed elsewhere, and
2. What are the periodisations of art produced on the territory of Central and Eastern European countries; what are the theoretical and methodological strategies for conceptualising local styles; and how was the concept of influence used in establishing hierarchical relationships.

Because Central and Eastern European art historians did not simply replicate or passively adopt theories and methodologies elaborated elsewhere, nor did they work independently of larger developments in the discipline, we will constantly relate their writings to the writings of other historians, from a non-hierarchical perspective. Researching the conceptualisation of a theoretical framework that would accommodate the artistic production of the past will show the difficulties in dealing with a complex reality without simplifying and essentializing it along ideological lines.

The research will also show that the three concepts that we focus on are not neutral or strictly descriptive, and that their use in art history needs to be reconsidered.

It is hard to give a broadly acceptable definition of the concept of luxury, which as a field of study has also been largely neglected by historians and sociologists. From a moral or philosophical point of view, luxury is seen as a form of decadence, although from the economic perspective it is seen as a force that drives development of the consumerist economy. Every society knows it in some form, regardless of the degree of economic development, reserving luxury to elite groups, who show their power and pomp through the display of luxury goods. The history of luxury is therefore, from this perspective, a history of power, reflecting the syncretism of cultural and political thought. Luxury and fashion as components of material culture can also be analyzed through the lens of cultural history, since they play an important role in the creation of visual culture.

This project proposes to analyze the Christian elites of Ottoman dominated Europe in the Early Modern period from these perspectives, and to look at how they defined their social status and identity at the intersection of East and West. In such an analysis, the Westernization of South-Eastern Europe proceeds not just through the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the influence of the French Revolution, but also through changes in visual culture brought about by Western influence on notions of luxury and fashion. This approach allows a closer appreciation of the synchronicities and time lags between traditional culture, developments in political thought and social change in the context of the modernization or “Europeanization” of this part of Europe.

– Publications

Our project proposes a fragmentary account of the art histories produced in present-day Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia between 1850 and 1950, from an entangled histories perspective. We will look at the relationships between the art histories produced in these countries and the art histories produced in Western Europe. But, more importantly, we will investigate how the art histories written in the countries mentioned above resonate with each other, either proposing conflicting interpretations of the past, or ignoring uncomfortable competing discourses.

We will investigate the art histories written between 1850 and 1950 because we are interested in how art history contributed to nation building discourses. Therefore, we will focus on those art histories that concur to nationalising the past. Our project is articulated around three crucial concepts – periodisation, style and influence – set in the context of relevant contemporary historiographies produced in Western Europe, and analysing the entanglements with competing historiographies in each of the countries considered. We will focus on two main issues:

1. How did Central and Eastern European art historians adopt, adapt and respond to theoretical and methodological issues developed elsewhere, and
2. What are the periodisations of art produced on the territory of Central and Eastern European countries; what are the theoretical and methodological strategies for conceptualising local styles; and how was the concept of influence used in establishing hierarchical relationships.

Because Central and Eastern European art historians did not simply replicate or passively adopt theories and methodologies elaborated elsewhere, nor did they work independently of larger developments in the discipline, we will constantly relate their writings to the writings of other historians, from a non-hierarchical perspective. Researching the conceptualisation of a theoretical framework that would accommodate the artistic production of the past will show the difficulties in dealing with a complex reality without simplifying and essentializing it along ideological lines.

The research will also show that the three concepts that we focus on are not neutral or strictly descriptive, and that their use in art history needs to be reconsidered.

Our project aims to provide a reappraisal of Bacon’s work and his legacy in the seventeenth century by focusing on a set of interrelated disciplinary contexts that, for reasons of interpretative and heuristic convenience, we have decided to call the early modern ‘medicine of the mind’. In doing so, we will be able to make sense of many aspects of Bacon’s work that still remain obscure and, as an added bonus, to clarify a number of long debated questions concerning seventeenth-century science and natural philosophy.

‘Medicine of the mind’ was commonly used by early modern philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians and physicians to refer to a set of practices for training and improving the powers of the mind. Disciplines dealing with the medicine of the mind devised methods to train the soul and the body to collaborate towards the attainment of forms of practical wisdom. Such disciplines provided regimens of life, cures for the passions and methods to discipline one’s own thought, as in the writings of John Woolton, John Abernethy, Thomas Rogers, Thomas Wright and Robert Burton, or in the translations of continental Protestant Neostoics (e.g. Pierre de la Primaudaye, Phillippe Du Plessis Mornay, Simon Goulart).

Our project aims at recovering a body of knowledge that, precisely because of the elusive nature of its disciplinary collocation, seems not to have filled any specific institutional niche or disciplinary pigeonhole in the early modern system of knowledge and has therefore escaped the attention of scholars working in the field of the history of early modern natural philosophy. The recovery of this background will make possible a new and fruitful reading of Bacon’s programme for the reformation of knowledge. We will also explore the way in which in the second half of the seventeenth century, under its Baconian definition, the notion of medicina mentis became part of the language of experimental philosophy.

We expect this project to have a significant impact upon the field of early modern intellectual history. By opening new exegetical horizons in the area of Bacon studies and allied subjects, it will promote a reconsideration of the development of seventeenth-century English natural philosophy and science. It will stimulate a reconsideration of the meaning of method in early modern culture. It will bring to the fore aspects that have previously been considered less relevant, such as Bacon’s theory of living matter and his theological views. It will also throw light on the meanings of ‘Baconianism’ in the seventeenth century.

Stages of research:

The Stoic and Protestant Connection
Medicine of the Mind and Francis Bacon’s Theology
The French Connection and Varieties of Baconianism
‘Priests of nature’: Baconianism in the Seventeenth Century

Workshops and colloquia:

‘Francis Bacon and the Medicine of the Mind: Stoic Protestantism in Late Renaissance England’
New Europe College, Bucharest, 13-15 May 2010

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‘The Order of Nature, Theological Anthropology, and Medicine of the Mind: Francis Bacon and Religion Reconsidered’
New Europe College, 1-2 March 2013

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‘Finding a path through the woods: Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum’
University Paris 7 (Diderot), 12-13 December 2014
Conveners: Dana Jalobeanu and Koen Vermeir

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‘History and philosophy of scientific experimentation’
27 November 2014, University of Bucharest
Convener: Dana Jalobeanu

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‘Experiments and the Arts of Discovery in Early Modern Europe’ (4th Bucharest Colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy)
University of Bucharest 12-13 May 2013
Conveners: Dana Jalobeanu and Mihnea Dobre

International colloquium jointly organized by the ERC starting grant MOM with the research project ‘From natural history to science’, CELFIS, University of Bucharest.

Invited speakers: Daniel Garber (Princeton), Roger Ariew (University of South Florida), Peter Anstey (Sydney), Mordechai Feingold (Caltech), Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge), Kathryn Murphy (Oxford), Koen Vermeir (Paris), Johnathan Regier (Paris), Albrecht Heffer (Gent), Alberto Vanzo (Warwick), Benedino Gemelli (Belizzona), Evan Ragland (Alabama), Arianna Borelli (Wupertal), Sergius Kodera (Vienna).

Participants: Sorana Corneanu, Vlad Alexandrescu, Oana Matei, Sebastian Mateiescu, Claudia Dumitru, Daniel Schwarz (Univ. California, San Diego), Lucio Mare (University of South Florida), Ville Paukonen (University of Helsinki)

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‘Francis Bacon on Natural History and Natural Magic: The Mystery of Sylva Sylvarum’, International Colloquium and Workshop, Princeton University, 14-27 May 2012. Organizers: Daniel Garber and Dana Jalobeanu.

Joint event, organized by the ERC starting grant MOM and Princeton University; a two-week long workshop on Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and an international colloquium.

Invited speakers: Bill Newman (Indiana), Silvia Manzo (University of La Plata). Participants: Koen Vermeir (SPHERE, Paris 7), Sorana Corneanu (University of Bucharest), Doina Cristina Rusu (University of Bucharest), James Lancaster (Warburg), Laura Georgescu (University of Ghent), Ian Stewart (Toronto)