Photo: privat (2), Princeton University

The three new fellows (from left): Dr. Andrey Klebanov, Dr. Dimitra Spathara, and Dr. Marcel Camprubí

The “Postdoctoral Fellowships” are being announced as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). They are a funding program aimed at researchers who have earned a PhD and support outstanding research projects at an individual level. Dr. Marcel Camprubí, Dr. Andrey Klebanov, and Dr. Dimitra Spathara will complete their “European Fellowships” at the University of Hamburg, where they will work closely with the clusters of excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” and “Quantum Universe,” among others.

The opportunity to spend time in another European country and to network with colleagues both within and outside one’s own field of research are key components of this funding program for early career researchers. Collaborations with non-academic sectors are also possible. The fellowships are considered a special distinction, as many MSCA fellows go on to achieve success in other European funding programs administered by the European Research Council.

An overview of the three successful projects:

Grammar and its exceptions—in the Sanskrit of ancient India

Project: „Verse, Grammar, Pedagogy: The Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti, a Ninth-Century Kashmiri Teaching Text on Pāṇini’s Lists“ (VERGAP)

Anyone who learns a language is familiar with the problem: in addition to general rules, there are always exceptions that cannot be easily classified. This difficulty is by no means a modern one. Such borderline cases can already be found in Pāṇini's Sanskrit grammar from the 3rd century BC—one of the oldest and most influential descriptions of language in the world. In around 4,000 formulaic rules, Pāṇini developed a systematic analysis of Sanskrit. But even this formally precise system could not do without word lists in which special cases were recorded. It is precisely these lists that continue to pose problems for researchers today: they have not been preserved independently, but only as part of later commentaries, making it almost impossible to reconstruct their original form.

As part of his two-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Dr. Andrey Klebanov is working at the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harunaga Isaacson, Professor of Indian Culture and History at the Faculty of Humanities and in the cluster of excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts,” to make available for the first time a previously unedited text from the 9th century. The Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti, which originated in Kashmir, presents Pāṇini's word lists in verse form, thus offering a rare, datable anchor point for their historical form. A digital, freely accessible edition of this text will be created. In addition to philological and lexicographical analysis, Klebanov is also investigating the pedagogical function of verse form as a means of conveying complex grammatical content as part of the project, which is funded with €217,965.

Novel materials for dark matter detectors

Project: “Ultra-pure, high-strength, electroformed Cu-based alloys for next generation rare-event searches” (PureCuAlloys)

Novel, extremely sensitive detectors are used for dark matter research. However, their discovery potential is limited by impurities that arise during manufacturing. Electroformed copper is the material of choice for applications with extreme radiopurity requirements. Building on this technology, novel alloys with enhanced mechanical properties compared to electroformed copper would maximise the physics potential by using less material or larger-scale detectors. This is where Dr. Dimitra Spathara's two-and-a-half-year PureCuAlloys project comes in, for which she will receive €272,456.

As part of this project, she will develop alloys with improved mechanical properties to make the detectors stronger. The first step will be to identify existing research gaps in a multi-stage process in order to develop concrete steps for the further course of the project, such as how to obtain sufficient properties description to validate materials models for their performance. This material design approach will greatly accelerate the development of alloys whose properties can be improved through thermodynamic and kinetic processes. Specifically, the results of PureCuAlloys will be used in the manufacturing of components for “DarkSPHERE-30”—a fully electroformed detector that will break new ground in the search for sub-GeV particles in dark matter. Prof. Dr. Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, Professor of Experimental Physics in the Department of Physics and at the cluster of excellence “Quantum Universe,” is supporting the Fellow project on behalf of the University of Hamburg.

Musical Diagrams as an interdisciplinary and intercultural phenomenon

Project: „Blurring the Lines: Arabic Musical Diagrams across Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries“ (ARAMUS)

Diagrams played an important role in the representation and transmission of knowledge in medieval music theory. A prominent example is al-Farabi’s tenth-century “Great Book of Music,” one of the most significant treatises in the Arabic music-theoretical tradition. Its diagrams serve, among other purposes, to represent abstract concepts such as pitches, intervals, and tonal systems visually.

In his project “Blurring the Lines: Arabic Musical Diagrams across Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries,” Dr. Marcel Camprubí examines these diagrams within a broader intellectual and cultural history. First, he investigates how music-theoretical diagrams related to the visual practices of other Arabic sciences, including astronomy, medicine, and arithmetic. Second, he compares them with diagrams in related Greek and Latin works, among them Ptolemy’s “Harmonics” and Boethius’ “Fundamentals of Music.” By bringing into dialogue traditions that have been largely studied in isolation, ARAMUS investigates the place of music within Arabic scientific culture while demonstrating how the history of music theory was shaped by exchanges among different traditions of knowledge and visual representation. Methodologically, it combines approaches from manuscript studies, media history, and the history of science. The two-year project, which is funded with €202,125, is based at the Faculty of Humanities and in the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” under Prof. Dr. Matteo Nanni, Professor of Historical Musicology, whose research includes the history and theory of musical notation.