European projects at EPHE-PSL
The EPHE-PSL actively participates in calls for European projects, and since 2012 has had a support service for setting up and monitoring research projects. As an interdisciplinary institution, EPHE-PSL supports projects in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the life and earth sciences. It is recognized in the fact that it champions rare disciplines , always combining practice and research. Its research laboratories currently host several European projects (ERC, MSCA, collaborative projects), as well as projects from other French and foreign funding bodies.
Below is a detailed list of European projects, sorted by type, from the most recent to the oldest.
To help you put together your European projects, you can consult our dedicated page and contact our project management support center (MsPro).
1. ERC (European Research Council) projects
2. MSCA (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions) grants
a) Individual grants
b) Doctoral Network
c) COFUND
3. European collaborative projects
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ERC (European Research Council) projects
- MANTRATANTRAM – Monsoon Asia as the Nexus for the Transfer of Tantra along the Maritime routes
September 2024 - August 2029
ERC Consolidator Grant
PI: Andrea Acri
The project aims to study Tantrism from the point of view of cultural contacts between the various communities in the geo-environmental region known as “Monsoon Asia”, approaching the phenomenon globally and in terms of “connected histories”.
- MANTRAMS – Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia
September 2024 - August 2030
ERC Synergy Grant
Lead researcher: Andrea Acri
Through an interdisciplinary approach combining methods from Indian studies, anthropology, sound studies, media studies, art history and the history of religions, the project will produce a history of mantras on a global scale from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
- EvoGenArch – Evolution of the genetic architecture of quantitative traits
September 2024 - August 2029
ERC Starting Grant
PI: Pierre de Villemereuil
The ERC EvoGenArch aims to analyze the evolution of the genetic architecture of complex traits by developing an innovative statistical methodology. It explores the link between this architecture and evolutionary regimes (selective and neutral), first in common lizards, then in over 20 species.
- PaganTibet – Reconstructing the Pagan Religion of Tibet
October 2023 - September 2028
ERC Advanced Grant
PI: Charles Ramble
The PaganTibet project studies a corpus of Tibetan manuscripts discovered in 2005, relating to a religious tradition that predates Buddhism. These texts, coming from families of Leyu priests, represent a minority branch of the Bon religion. Despite difficulties related to writing and codicological particularities, they bear witness to primitive religious practices similar to those found at Dunhuang. The project aims to reconstruct these pre-Buddhist practices, which date back over a thousand years.
- MiDRASH – Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script
October 2023 - September 2029
ERC Synergy Grant
PI: Judith Olszowy-Schlanger et Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra
MiDRASH aims to conduct a study of medieval Hebrew manuscripts to enhance understanding of the various literary and historical facets of a corpus that is still largely unknown yet that has made a major contribution to European culture. MiDRASH has its origins in “eScriptorium”, the collective open-source digital infrastructure of the “Scripta PSL” program for the automatic transcription of handwritten and printed documents.
- VIETNAMICA – Historical Research and Data Processing on Ancient Vietnamese Inscriptions
November 2019 - October 2025
ERC Advanced Grant
PI: Philippe Papin
The project aims to analyze and process the stamps that reproduce the inscriptions engraved on the thousands of donation steles erected in Vietnamese villages from the 16th to the 20th century. These inscriptions, written in local Chinese enameled with vernacular script, open up new perspectives for writing a history of religious beliefs, the economy and social structures of the rural world.
- HisTochText – History of the Tocharian Texts of the Pelliot Collection
October 2018 - March 2024
ERC Advanced Grant
PI: Georges-Jean Pinault
This ambitious program aims to describe the manuscript culture of Buddhism in the monasteries of the Kucha region in the 1st millennium AD, based on the manuscripts brought back by the Pelliot mission to Central Asia (1906-1908) and deposited at the Bibliothèque national de France (BnF) in 1910.
- GESHAEM – The Graeco-Egyptian State: Hellenistic Archives from Egyptian Mummies
September 2017 - August 2025
ERC Starting Grant - transferred in 2023 to EPHE-PSL
OI: Marie-Pierre Chaufray
The aim of GESHAEM is to study the economy, taxation and territorial management in Egypt's most important agricultural region, the Fayoum, in the first century of Greek rule (3rd century BC). To this end, a large corpus of administrative and fiscal papyri discovered in Egyptian mummies will be studied, the unpublished Greek and Egyptian papyri from the Sorbonne's Jouguet collection.
- RurLand – Rural Landscape in north-eastern Roman Gaul
February 2014 - April 2018
ERC Advanced Grant
PI:Michel Reddé
The aim of the project is to study rural space in northern and eastern Gaul from the beginning of La Tène D1 to the end of the 5th century AD. Focusing on the Roman period, it will examine the long-term evolution of the rural world, from its protohistoric antecedents to the changes of Late Antiquity.
MSCA grants - Individual grants
- JeWit – Jewish women in pre-modern Italy: Magic, medicine and the inquisition
October 2024 - September 2026
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship
Grant holder: Alessia Bellusci
The project aims to reconstruct the history of Jewish women in medieval and early modern Italy, drawing on medico magical traditions related to childbirth and the female body.
- MappingSalvation – Soteriological Itineraries in the Ancient Mediterranean World
October 2023 - September 2025
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship
Grant holder: Elsa Giovanna Simonetti
MappingSalvation explores the Mediterranean basin in the early Roman imperial period. It aims to establish a new methodology for the study of salvation experiences and theories, structured around a newly developed epistemic model that allows for the in-depth study of salvation trajectories across multiple cultural contexts.
- SPPELME – The Science, Philosophy, and Poetics of Experience in Late Medieval England
October 2021 - March 2024
MSCA Individual Fellowship
Grant holder: Marco Nievergelt
The main aim of the project is to shed light on the full range and complexity of engagement toward the experience found in the works of English poets between 1360 and 1450.
MSCA grants – Doctoral Network
- NO-CANCER-NET – Advanced Engineering of Nitric Oxide Based Therapeutics for Triple Negative Breast Cancer Training Network
October 2023 - September 2027
MSCA Doctoral Network
Grant holder: Stéphanie Plenchette
NO-CANCER-NET will focus on triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and nitric oxide (NO)-based therapeutic development. Triple-negative breast cancer accounts for 10-20% of breast cancers and is characterized by an early diagnosis and an aggressive phenotype. Our network has demonstrated an important role for inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and NO signaling in the metastatic progression of breast cancer.
Fellowships MSCA - COFUND
Fellowships PrFP (Paris Region fellowship Programme)
The “Paris Region Fellowship” project was part of the European Horizon 2020 program, Marie-Sklodowska-Curie actions, and aimed to boost research and enhance the international profile of the Paris region.
It was a call for applications for a post-doctoral fellowship for foreign researchers ((see program).
program). Through this call, two post-doctoral fellows were recruited at the EPHE:
- FEAST - The choreography of the banquet at the court of the Valois-Bourgogne: symbols and representations of the culture, power and diplomacy of a dynasty
Grant holder: Maddalena Bellavitis
Project sheet - The Intellectual and Cultural History of Shi'i Islamic Scholarship Among the Iranian émigré Community in the Deccan Sultanates, c. 1500-1700 CE
Grant holder: Hunter Bandy
Project sheet
PSL grants - Ai4theSciences
Funding for 26 doctoral contracts at the interfaces of artificial intelligence or massive data processing is provided over three cohorts. AI4theSciences is supported and co-funded by the European Horizon 2020 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-COFUND program.(see program).
Two theses have been funded at EPHE:
- Processing eDNA data into relevant indicators of ecosystem health and biodiversity monitoring
Grant holder: Letizia Lamperti
Call 2020 - Whole genome sequencing and deep learning: estimating demographic and adaptive processes in range expansion scenarios
Grant holder: Alba Nieto Heredia
Call 2021
3. European collaborative projects
- HABITRACK – Habitat tracking for the conservation of huntable bird species
January 2024 - December 2027
Horizon Europe - Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment
PI: Aurélien Besnard
The EU-funded HABITRACK project aims to investigate the habitat requirements of mature individuals of various non-protected migratory bird species during non-breeding periods, by deploying multi-sensor tracking beacons. It will study demographic trends and habitat use in Europe, and predict the impact of climate change on demography.
- Résilience PPP
June 2022 - May 2026
Research infrastructure
PI: Sylvio De Francheschi
Résilience PPP follows on from REIRES (2018-2021) and Résilience (2021-2022), in which EPHE has been involved since the launch. Built around a European consortium of thirteen universities in partner countries, this program is the final preparatory phase before the creation of an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure) in religious sciences. The aim of this infrastructure is to form a network to facilitate access to physical and dematerialized data, pool cutting-edge instruments and foster innovation through the creation of new tools to meet the specific needs of religious sciences including new technologies such as AI.
- HYP – Hypothesis You Preserve
December 2023 - November 2026
Creative Europe - European Cooperation project (Small scale)
PI: Samuel Etienne
HYP brings together creative writing, alternative history and creative academic outlets to develop a collaborative encyclopedic digital platform on alternative history, open to transnational participation, interfaced with a museum collection and anchored in a fictional universe, that of Winepunk.