The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to announce that Dr Federica Gigante, a historian and scholar affiliated with the University of Oxford, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her innovative project, Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European Encounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580–1700) (UNSEEN). The project will be based at the Khalili Research Centre, the Faculty’s centre for research into the art and material culture of the Islamic societies of the Middle East and of their non-Muslim members and neighbours.
The ERC Starting Grants are part of the European Union's Horizon Europe programme and aim to empower early-career researchers to pursue ambitious research projects. This year, the ERC awarded nearly €780 million to 494 promising scientists and scholars across Europe, including six Oxford researchers. Each of the Oxford researchers selected for a Starting Grant will receive up to €1.5 million for a period of five years.
Dr Gigante’s ERC-funded project UNSEEN focuses on the role of slavery in the transmission of things and knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries. In particular, it will focus on the port towns of France, Spain, and Italy and their communities of enslaved galley-rowers of Muslim origins. During periods of non-navigation, these individuals turned into artisans and merchants, opened pop-up shops, and sold goods and remedies to local communities. This, Dr Gigante argues, brought into Europe technological and medicinal practices from the Islamic world and shaped the growing interest in Islamic culture among European collectors, physicians, and scholars.
Dr Gigante is an expert in the material and intellectual exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe, with a particular interest in the movement of objects, people, and ideas across the Mediterranean and their adaptation in new cultural contexts. She specialises in Islamic art and scientific instruments and has a background as a museum curator. Her previous work has been supported by various prestigious institutions, including the Royal Society, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Max Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
Dr Gigante's research has already attracted considerable international attention, notably with her recent discovery of a medieval astrolabe held in a museum in Verona, Italy. This significant find has been featured in major international media, including The Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, and The New York Times. More details on this discovery can be found here.
Dr Gigante commented:
I am humbled by the incredible support that some colleagues have given me in pulling this project together. It has been hard, really hard at times, but their enthusiasm throughout brought fun, laughter and a touch of much-needed light-heartedness. This achievement would not have been possible without them.Thank you to both the Oxford and Cambridge crew and to all the people who shared freely of their time with me; and thank you to the ERC committee for putting so much trust (and funding) in me and my ideas.
The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies congratulates Dr Federica Gigante and all other Oxford recipients on this remarkable achievement and looks forward to the valuable insights and contributions their research will bring to the academic community and beyond.
