SCHOLARSHIPS FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION JANUARY 2015 ROUND MOUNDS Were they really built by Normans? INSIDE THIS ISSUE The ‘me’ in memory Exploring the developing self The American steppe Russian influences on the Great Plains GEMOLOGY NANOSYNTHESIS New materials, new worlds Jewellers, travellers and the A new method of nanostructure Understanding the uses of Bronze Age axes science of gems in France in fi lms XXXX LEVER JAN15 NEWSLTTR.indd 1 28/01/2015 11:34 DIRECTOR’S NOTE FUNDING UPDATES COMPETITIONS SCHEME NEWS OLD AND NEW Award winners in no fewer than seven and the latest round produced over LEVERHULME RESEARCH funding streams are announced in this 750 applications, so we were very CENTRES edition of the Newsletter. pleased to be able to make 100 awards. We congratulate the recipients of Competition to secure one of these The Leverhulme Trust has announced our new Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Fellowships is obviously fierce – so many the launch of a major new initiative to Awards. Fourteen universities will each congratulations to those who succeeded establish Leverhulme Research Centres receive £1 million, over three years, to in this particular round. in the UK, representing a commitment provide 15 scholarships per institution For the first time, our popular of up to £10 million over 10 years for to address topics as diverse as Artist in Residence Grants were made each Centre. The objective is to fund understanding maritime futures, climate via the competitive mechanism of a innovative research of the greatest justice, genetics journeys into history and single ‘gathered field’. Over 100 bids originality and to encourage bold, mathematics for a sustainable society. were received, and our expert panel was ‘disruptive’ thinking, capable of creating a With match-funding from a number greatly impressed by the originality of the step-change in the field and transforming of institutions, some 300 students will bids and quality of the field, so the Board our understanding of a topic of benefit.A second call for bids follows in was pleased to make additional funds significance to contemporary societies. 2017. available for a total of 21 awards. The The expectation is that Centres Other schemes will be familiar to competition will now run annually in this will draw upon a range of disciplinary those who follow the Trust’s activities. new format. perspectives and expertise, perhaps Five Philip Leverhulme Prizes (each The ‘core business’ of the Trust bringing new disciplinary mixes to worth £100,000) were awarded in: continues to be its Research Project bear on an emerging topic of societal Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Grants, which typically represent about significance. They should have the Statistics, History, Sociology and Social one third of the Trust’s annual spend. capacity to become internationally- Policy, Philosophy and Theology, and The 62 grants agreed at the November recognised ‘centres of research excellence’ Law. Again, competition was intense, meeting cover a typically wide range in the chosen area. The Trust has a with individual subject areas attracting of fascinating topics in the sciences, reputation for encouraging research between 50 and 100 nominations. Many humanities and social sciences. which is often fundamental or congratulations to the thirty winners. Finally, we have recently announced curiosity-driven (so-called ‘blue The 2015 Prizes will be in six different a major new venture: a competition for skies’), multi-disciplinary, and perhaps subjects – so please visit the Trust website Leverhulme Research Centres. The Trust somewhat higher risk. for details. Board’s hope is that the competition The scheme is now open, and Major Research Fellowships and proves to be of sufficient appeal to the each UK university will be permitted to Early Career Fellowships continue to research community that it can be run on make one bid as the principal applicant be hugely popular, and applications for a regular basis and become part of our institution. Full details and application both schemes rose again. Early Career established – and growing – portfolio of information are available on the Fellowships are targeted at what is clearly awards. Leverhulme Trust website. a persistent pinch-point of entry to the scholarly and research professions, Professor Gordon Marshall WHY THE LEVERHULME TRUST? Application forms for Research Project Grants and International Networks require applicants to explain why they are CONTACTS applying to the Trust. Peer reviewers and Trust Board members place considerable weight on your reply, so give very careful The Leverhulme Trust thought to what you write and take note 1 Pemberton Row, London, EC4A 3BG of the tips on the Leverhulme Trust’s Tel 020 7042 9888 | Web www.leverhulme.ac.uk website. For more profiles of current research and full awards listings, please visitthe Leverhulme Trust website (www.leverhulme.ac.uk). To order additional copies of this newsletter, please contact Bahia Sheppard at [email protected]. 2 January 2015 XXXX LEVER JAN15 NEWSLTTR.indd 2 28/01/2015 11:34 Jewellers, travellers and the science of gems in France, 1630–1830 Exploring the emergence of the ‘science understood. This is especially true in of gems’, Michael Bycroft’s research the history of physics, where historians will shed light on how a shared interest have given far more attention to in precious and semi-precious stones the instruments that experimenters brought collectors, experimenters, built than to the materials that the craftsmen and merchants together in instruments measured. Gems address early modern Europe this problem because they were used to study phenomena (such as heat, light What can you do with a diamond? and electricity) that are part of physics ‘Science’ may not be the first answer that rather than biology or the earth comes to mind, but it was a common sciences. one in early modern France. Naturalists Gemology not only united collected diamonds, displayed them different branches of early modern in cabinets, and arranged them in science but also bound the sciences to classification schemes. Experimenters trade, travel and the decorative arts. rubbed them to draw out their Gems arrived in France on the ships ‘electric virtue,’ heated them to study of the French East India Company, in luminescence, and weighed them with the hands of globe-trotting merchants, precision balances. Chemists created and in the luggage of adventurous diamonds (or so they thought) with astronomers and naturalists. Paris-based dyes and furnaces, and destroyed them scientists relied on these travellers for with giant mirrors in their studies of their raw materials. They also shared light and combustion. As for diamonds, the merchants’ interest in detecting so for rubies and emeralds, amber and counterfeits and drew on the practical quartz, and many other precious and skills of jewellers and gem-cutters. semi-precious stones. All were part To build on these connections of a burgeoning science of gems that I will be studying a range of sources brought collectors into contact with that include mineralogical treatises, experimenters and that brought both into jewellery manuals, and the archives of contact with jewellers and international the Paris Academy of Science, the Paris travellers. These points of contact are Natural History Museum, the Paris the focus of a monograph and two jewellers’ guild, and the French East India international workshops that I will work Company. on over the next three years. Surprisingly little has been written Dr Michael Bycroft about the early modern science of gems, University of Warwick in France or elsewhere. The assumption Early Career Fellowship seems to be that scientists ceased to see gems as a properly scientific category some time around 1600. It is true that, in the seventeenth century, philosophers and experimenters began to question the magical and medical properties that had long been ascribed to these intensely symbolic materials. But this questioning did not spell the end of gemology as a serious field of research. It was only at the TOP TO BOTTOM Painting of specimens very end of the eighteenth century that in a mineral cabinet, by the French painter mineralogists began to drop ‘precious Alexandre-Isidore Leroy de Barde (late stone’ as a category in their classification eighteenth century). Source: Web Gallery of minerals. of Art, http://www.wga.hu; Woodcuts Throughout the preceding showing rock crystal specimens, from period, the collection and classification Anselmus Boethius de Boodt, Gemmarum of gems went hand-in-hand with et lapidum historia (1647). Source: experimentation. Experimenting and Google Books; Diagram of diamond collecting aro e b th hot topics in the cuts, from Antoine-Joseph Dezallier history of science, but the relationship d’Argenville, Oryctologie (Paris, 1755). between these two activities is poorly Source: Gallica. www.leverhulme.ac.uk 3 XXXX LEVER JAN15 NEWSLTTR.indd 3 28/01/2015 11:34 Were round mounds recycled? Every schoolboy and girl knows that doubt over the Marlborough mound’s question. The project will identify mottes castles with large earthen mounds, the origin that caused me – with suitable in England with prehistoric potential, latter known as mottes, were built by funds and resources from both the and through a targeted programme the Normans; a wooden tower on a Marlborough Mound Trust and English of coring, survey work and scientific mound of earth is our archetypal image Heritage – to put together a small project analyses, will determine their date of of the time. But were they really built to drill two boreholes from its summit construction, sequence of development by the Normans? A new project, led by down to its very base. The resultant cores and environmental context. Jim Leary, will challenge this medieval were removed for analyses, and small If it is shown that many, or even sacred cow by investigating whether samples of organic material were taken just some, of the mottes investigated all mottes were constructed anew or from various points within the core and are prehistoric, it will have considerable if some represent re-used prehistoric radiocarbon dated.