AntCoCo

The ERC supports excellent frontier research of creative researchers. What is unique about your project AntCoCo?

Laws are typically short and (at least for jurists) clearly phrased. Not so late antique laws (called constitutions): they can be surprisingly long and hide their legal content in language that seems baroque to us. However, the vast majority of these ancient laws are only partially extant: what we do have are the legal cores, excerpted from the full constitutions. Alarmingly little research has been carried out on the full constitutions themselves.

What are the aims of your project?

There is no satisfactory collection of the full constitutions. This lacuna must be filled. In late antiquity, these texts were accepted as remarkable productions of litterati, and they were authored by some of the best authors of the period. Their character as literature has never been investigated. The constitutions use a surprisingly complicated prose rhythm which is not easy to evaluate; in that respect AntCoCo intends to provide crucial help.

The ERC emphasises it’s bottom-up approach which ensures that funds flow into new and promising areas of research with a greater degree of flexibility. How would you describe the research design of your project AntCoCo?

The approach crosses various boundaries between disciplines. For texts that were laws but were regarded a literature, you need to bring together legal historians and philologists; to understand the Sitz im Leben of these texts, you need historians. Some of the constitutions are extant only in inscriptions or on papyri, so you need epigraphers and papyrologists. The evaluation of the prose rhythm is supported by a nifty IT tool for the creation of which a programmer joined the team.

You have already successfully applied for an ERC Starting Grant with your project ACO (link). What motivated you to apply for an ERC Consolidator Grant immediately after the end of the project?

Grant management has its pros and cons. There are numerous reporting duties, there is much administrative work to do, there is a lot of HR management involved, you depend on the work of others. But then again, you have got the resources to really get to the bottom of a self-chosen research problem, you can focus on one thing, you are in a position to support promising young scholars early in their career. In short, either you hate running a grant, or you love it. I personally belong to the second group, and this is why I developed another grant proposal.

What are the special features and differences in the application between ERC Starting and Consolidator Grant?

In terms of proposal writing, there is no difference between StG and CoG. The main difference is the competition: StG is 2 to 7 years after PhD, so your competitors will be mostly postdoctoral researchers or assistant professors, few of them on permanent positions. CoG is 7 to 12 years after PhD, so you will now have to face tenured professors, perhaps most of them at the level of associated, but many too at the full level.