22 Jul 08

Dr Bjarke Frellesvig received a research grant award from the AHRC for his research on ‘Verb semantics and argument realisation in premodern Japanese’.

Oxford University’s Humanities Division has received almost £3 million in research project grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund new collaborative research.

The AHRC research grant awards have been awarded to members of the Oriental Studies, Classics, Philosophy and History faculties. The English faculty also shared an award led by Nottingham University under the Museums, Archives and Libraries Programme.

Due to funding cuts, just 38 research grant awards were made nationally in this funding round, five of which went to Oxford University, giving the University a success rate over three times the national average.

The largest award is £826,715, made to Dr Bjarke Frellesvig of the Oriental Studies faculty whose research is on ‘Verb semantics and argument realisation in premodern Japanese’.

Dr Frellesvig said: 'Because of the complexity and quantity of the empirical material, a project such as this is far too big for individual researchers. This grant provides an unprecedented opportunity for collaborative, in-depth work on core aspects of pre-modern Japanese language, enabling us to constitute the largest research group ever to work together on pre-modern Japanese language.'

The second largest grant is awarded to Dr Malcolm Vale of the History faculty and will be shared with his colleagues at Liverpool University for their research into ‘The Gascon Rolls 1317-1468’.

Professor Bert Smith, of the Classics faculty received £644,290 for his archaeological research into ‘The last statues of antiquity’ and a project studentship. Dr Elton Barker, also from classics, was awarded £66,724 as an early career applicant for ‘Cities once great but are now small: imaginations of space in Herodotus’ and will be collaborating with colleagues from Oxford and Birmingham University.

Professor Smith said: 'Antiquity was populated with thousands of statues of gods, emperors, and citizens – public markers of honour and memory. Our project quantifies and studies the character of the last distinctive period of this ‘classical’ statue habit, from AD 300 to 600. My co-investigator Bryan Ward-Perkins and I are thrilled to get this award and look forward to working through our ideas on cultural representation in late antiquity.'

The final research grant award of £571,412 has gone to Professor Julian Savulescu, member of the Philosophy faculty and Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, for research into ‘Science and religious conflict’. The award comes just days after Professor Savulescu was awarded a Wellcome Trust award of more than £800,000.

Dr Steve Clarke, Senior Researcher on the project, said: 'The project is to investigate the behaviour of people involved in moral disagreements in religious contexts. It will look at recent work in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and social psychology.

'We are extremely pleased to get this award, as it is an important project. It is the chance to do some academic work that will make a significant policy difference – it could help to reduce religious disagreements.'

Professor Ralph Hanna in English was also part of a team led by the University of Nottingham which was awarded £290,000 from the Museums, Archives and Libraries programme for ‘The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: texts, owners and readers’.

Head of Humanities, Professor Sally Shuttleworth, said: 'I am delighted by the number of awards and their range, which highlights the sheer diversity of research within the division, from premodern Japanese to issues in contemporary ethics. At a time when the AHRC is cutting its support in various areas, it is particularly pleasing to receive such a strong endorsement of the quality of Oxford Humanities research.'