Royal Society of Edinburgh research awards
Five research projects at the University of St Andrews have received funding in the latest round of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s (RSE) Research Awards Programme.
The RSE Research Awards supports Scotland’s research sector by nurturing promising talent, encouraging research in Scotland, and promoting international collaboration. The Awards promote innovation and entrepreneurship, supporting leading research that benefits Scotland’s cultural, economic and social wellbeing.
Dr Marine Ganofsky from the School of Modern Languages received a Small Research Grant for a project entitled ‘Enchanted spaces: Rococo architecture as aphrodisiac in 18th-Century libertine fiction.’
Speaking about her project, Dr Ganofsky said: “Architecture speaks not just to the eyes but to the body, making it a potentially powerful tool of seduction. In eighteenth-century France, architects like Jean-François Blondel, leveraging the sensualist and materialist theories of the time, designed spaces to arouse specific emotions such as reverence. Through clever manipulation of dimensions, colours, shapes and materials, architecture could even bypass virtue, acting as an aphrodisiac. This project will explore these metaphors of enchantment, revealing that, despite the progress of science and reason in the Enlightenment, the inner workings of human desires retained their magic.”
Dr Craig Smeaton from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development, with collaborators Dr Tobia Politi and Stefano Bonaglia from the University of Gothenburg, received a Small Research Grant for a project entitled ‘Fjord flux: Quantifying carbon fluxes from mid-latitude fjords’. Dr Smeaton said: “Scotland’s fjords are recognised as hotspots for the burial and storage of organic carbon and have the potential provide long-term climate regulation. Yet we don’t currently understand the fluxes of greenhouse gases into and out of the fjords. The RSE funded Fjord Flux project will bring together expertise from the University of St Andrews and the University of Gothenburg to investigate for the first time the fluxes of CO2, CH4 and N2O from the mid-latitude fjords of Scotland filling this crucial knowledge gap.”
Dr Andrea Brock from the School of Classics received a Personal Research Fellowship for a project entitled ‘A new environmental history of early Rome and the foundation of its republic.’ Dr Brock said: “I am very pleased to accept the RSE award, awarded to support my work completing a monograph, a new environmental history of Early Rome and its republic.”
Dr Rebekah Lamb from the School of Divinity, in collaboration with Dr Linden Bicket from the University of Edinburgh received a Research Collaboration Grant for a project entitled ‘Catholic women writers in Scotland and beyond’. Dr Lamb reflected on the award and said: “The RSE Collaboration Grant will be an invaluable support to me and my Co-Principal Investigator, Dr Linden Bicket, in hosting workshops for advanced and early career collaborators as we establish the scope of the first, interdisciplinary handbook on Catholic women writers in Scottish and transnational contexts.
“This project is a cross-institutional collaboration—including partnerships with the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge, and St Patrick’s Pontifical University in Maynooth—and will also include a series of public-facing events, such as coverage with BBC Scotland and a symposium at the National Library of Scotland, featuring an exhibition of manuscript treasures by Scottish Catholic women writers. I am very grateful to the RSE for supporting this timely, collaborative project which will recover Catholic women’s literary voices and highlight their major contributions to history and culture in past and present contexts.”
Finally, an International Bilateral Visits research award was given to The Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the RSE Bilateral Exchange Programme (Incoming Programme) where Dr Csongor István, from the Gedeon Institute for Soil Sciences, Hungary will visit colleagues at St Andrews, to work on a project entitled ‘Non-destructive, spatial mapping of animal burrows by combining archive images, subsurface remote sensing, and deep learning techniques.’
Category University news