What? This project is about making periodic superstructures, capable of holding many light harvesting units in precise arrangements. The superstructures are porphyrin-based and are envisioned to be formed by a self-assembly process, using discrete molecular rings of metalloporphyrins and small molecule linkers. The nature of these porphyrin rings, namely, their size, symmetry, and flexibility, are expected to contribute towards a directed self-assembly of different classes of superstructures. In their own right, these structures are very appealing. From a photophysical perspective, they are ideal candidates for investigating light-induced energy migration phenomena over long length scales. Why? The metalloporphyrin superstructures allows us to organise many porphyrin rings into highly ordered arrangements, which we can anticipate by design. This makes it possible to deduce structure-property relationships related to light-induced energy transfer in a highly ordered setting. This is important to understand the natural ordering of porphyrins within photosynthetic reaction centres and for engineering efficient light-harvesting systems. How? The project will be carried out in the research group of Prof. Harry L. Anderson at the Chemistry Research Laboratory in Oxford with Prof. Andrew Goodwin (Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory) as a close collaborator. The project will include several disciplines. Organic synthesis, complemented by computational modelling, will be used to prepare both porphyrin precursors and superstructures. Once superstructure materials have been made, these will be subjected to careful structural characterisation. To this end, we plan to use a range of solid-phase techniques, including: powder- and single-crystal X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy. Finally, through photophysical experiments, we plan to study the excited state energy migration behaviour of these materials.

What? Thormod Torfæus (1636-1719), an Icelander serving as royal antiquarian at the Danish court, owned a collection of Old Norse manuscripts, which after his death ended up in the collection of Árni Magnússon, who divided almost all these manuscripts into smaller units. Because of Magnússon's rearrangement activities and the agreement between Iceland and Denmark about the division of his collection, manuscripts which used to be in a single codex in Torfæus' library, today survive in many parts held in two countries. Therefore, their contents can no longer be seen in their entirety. My project employs the latest tools in digital preservation and cataloging to restore the dispersed manuscripts, and to make accessible, for the first time, the library of this important scholar to wider audiences. Why? Torfæus examined the Old Norse sagas as historical sources and commented extensively on various historical and cultural aspects of these texts in the margins of his manuscripts. This project analyses these sagas and the marginal annotations that accompany them in the context of virtually reconstructed manuscripts in order to answer research questions considering Torfæus' working methods as a historian, book collector, and commissioner. Torfæus' marginalia are valuable sources for the history of early modern Danish historiography, but they have hitherto remained unanalyzed, due to the dispersed state of his collection. This project is the first study of the entire corpus of his annotations which will provide insight into the early modern processes of knowledge creation and classification. How? This project expands upon traditional philological analysis with codicological examination of physical artefacts and innovative digital tools and methods applied to expand our knowledge and understanding of early modern scholarship. A basis of the project will be an Open Access database of Torfæus' manuscripts, which will include manuscript descriptions and virtual reconstructions of selected manuscripts. The digital encoding of the marginal annotations will enable me to develop analytical framework for the data classification, which will shed new light on the reception of Old Norse literature in early modern Denmark. Collaboration with the specialists from world-leading research institutes in Europe, UK, and the US, will assure necessary support to successfully conduct this project.

What? Since the Neolithic revolution, agriculture has been the foundation of human life. For most of human history, knowledge about soils, crops, and fertilizer, crucial for survival, has been rooted in local customs and obtained through 'learning by doing' processes passed down from one generation of farmers to the next. Rural Science studies how English natural philosophers, agricultural reformers, and farmers broke with customary and habitual farming knowledge in the late 16th and 17th centuries. The project hypothesizes that the intersecting emergence of experimental methods within natural philosophy, the rise of agrarian capitalism, and the reform-aspirations of agricultural improvers led to the development of an experimental and theory-based approach to farming in early modern England. Why? The project argues that the traditional dating of a scientific approach to farming to the late 18th and 19th centuries misses a crucial period in late 16th and 17th century England. In so doing, the project intervenes in the fields of agricultural history and the history of science by significantly enhancing our knowledge of the agricultural roots of early modern experimental science and the early modern roots of scientific approaches to agriculture. Finally, the project explores highly relevant themes within environmental history, such as the changing views on the role of human agency within wider natural systems following the rise of capitalist farming. How? To explore how the connection between experimental philosophy, agricultural reform, and farming unfolded in the period, the project creates the analytical concept of 'rural science'. The concept refers to the forms of knowledge and practices of knowledge production, such as information gathering, discussions, observations, and conducting experiments, occurring in the spaces where experimental philosophers, agricultural reformers, and farmers interacted, corresponded, and met. These spaces took various forms, from farms, fields, and gardens to correspondence and information networks. Through three cases studies, including extensive archival research, the project traces how the often messy but not entirely disorganized knowledge and practices of rural science unfolded throughout the period.

What? My project aims to unfold the moral responsibilities of democratically elected politicians with respect to their use of evidence. Part I of the project derives a theory about the special moral responsibilities of democratically elected politicians under ideal circumstances from the values that legitimate the moral role of politician in a liberal democracy. Part II maps the challenges politicians as lay people face in handling evidence and discusses how these facts ought to inform a formulation of ethical principles fit for actual, non-ideal circumstances. Part III formulates realistic ethical principles for responsible use of evidence in democratic decision-making under non-ideal circumstances. Why? The project fills a gap in the field of democratic theory which has thus far not been concerned with politicians' moral role and use of evidence. Some democratic theorists have proposed a division of labor according to which politicians define the political aims of the community, while experts and bureaucrats are needed to help devise the means with which to achieve political aims. However, in real-life democracies, politicians sometimes dominate the choice of means in a non-ideal way, for example, by ordering the manipulation of numbers or simply by misunderstanding esoteric evidence. Democratic theorists have not addressed this challenge to the democratic ideal and that is what my project sets out to do. How? In conducting my research, I will be working back and forth between (a) my theory of the moral responsibilities of politicians which I infer from a role-based moral theory in conjunction with theories of the value of liberal democracy in Part I (b) background evidence from social psychology and epistemology on how laypeople may respond to esoteric evidence, expert disagreement and scientific uncertainty which I map in Part II and (c) considered moral judgments about particular cases. I then continuously revise the three levels until I reach a coherent set of ethical principles in Part III.

What? The project examines how British engineers William Adams, H.F. Bishop, and A.S.E. Ackermann, British and Indian authors H. G. Wells and Rokeya Hossain, and the greater colonial newspapers the Bombay Gazette, The Civil & Military Gazette, and The Englishman constructed and imagined solar energy as an imperial infrastructure in the period of 1878-1915. Why? The energy humanist project proposes the term “solar imperialism” to describe a hitherto unstudied doctrine that imagines the extension of geopolitical power through the control of solar energy because it provides a correction to the understanding of modern solar energy which can reflexively contribute to a new and more nuanced understanding of the contemporary global energy transition. How? The project looks at energy not only from a material, economic, or technological perspective but from a humanist perspective, interrogating the imperial discourse in treatises by solar engineers, the decolonial agenda of speculative fiction, and the public agenda of colonial newspapers to arrive at a fuller and more complex understanding of how of culture and science mediates energy transition.