With the slogan “Brainwaves” the Researchers’ Night in Trier – City Campus meets Illuminale– will be showing that science is for everyone. There is a researcher in all of us. You only need a clever mind and a lot of curiosity. Our aim is to organize a public event showing on the one hand the exciting, interesting side of science and on the other hand how science can improve the citizens' everyday life. Another main target is to enhance public recognition of researchers and their role in society. Practical results of research will be delivered in a comprehensive and illustrative form, showing that science is all around us. To simulate everyday life situations the City Campus is grouped into seven Science Sceneries in the heart of the City. In these Sceneries different research presentation formats will be organized, using new formats of knowledge transfer. To bring science and researchers into peoples’ everyday life, the Sceneries will take place in unusual settings representing peoples’ normal life, e.g. the Science market place with Stage and European Corner, the Scientific Theatre and the area “Science goes to school”. The City Campus program includes hands on experiments and demonstrations, shows, contests, quizzes, exhibitions and much more. A significant number of researchers will participate in public events to interact face-to-face with the public. The visitors – mobilized through an extensive awareness campaign – will be given the chance to touch, feel and smell science. To increase the attractiveness the effective event Illuminale will be integrated in the European Researchers’ Night. Artistic illuminations of buildings and places will be combined with interesting spotlights on several areas of research. These spotlights are a metaphor for science and knowledge. Partners are the Trier University of Applied Sciences, the ttm trier Tourismus & Marketing GmbH and the Municipality of Trier.

Even though transport had a bad reputation in the discourse of the Roman elites, in recent research it became evident, that it had a vital impact on the prosperity of the Roman economy and thus on the long-term existence of the Roman Empire. Therefore, it is an absolute desideratum to explore Roman inland transport transdisciplinary, combining recent technological developments with experimental data and profound historical research to gain the most realistic transport times. The objective of STRADA is the development of a dynamic computer-based simulation system for water and land borne transport between the Adriatic Sea and the Danube. Thereby, STRADA is geared to three aims: a) the study of the spatial and temporal interconnectivity between Roman Italy and the Danube frontier, for gaining a better understanding of the economic cohesion of the Roman Empire, b) the analysis of the influence of environmental factors on the ancient transport system, c) and the introduction of dynamic simulations into historical research. For the implementation, the project will focus on three closely interwoven strands: The exact reconstruction of the ancient land- and water-routes, the experimental determination of the performance of the used land- and water-borne means of transport under changing environmental conditions, and the development of a time-related simulation system including local fine granular topography and historical weather data, different means of transport (water- and land-based) with different loads, the fatigue of the actors as well as necessary rests and loading times. STRADA will follow a modular design that will ease the sustainable use and a future extension of the simulation system. The chosen research area covers a wide range of landscapes from the Mediterranean lowlands, followed by different kinds of alpine regions, to a central European river landscape, which makes it easy adapt¬able to other times and places.

GoLingua contrasts the French language’s relative decline across post-Napoleonic Europe against its prominence as a “Global Lingua Franca” among new elites who came increasingly in contact with European space from 1800 through 1870. By focusing on the outward spread of the language from Paris to the country’s modest empire, researchers have lost sight of the female speakers and isolated elites from many areas who adopted French to connect with a globalizing world. My research recovers the stories of non-native French speakers from many regions in order to propose a new transnational framework for the study of the history of language. Recent histories of global French begin their accounts in the final third of the nineteenth century, when the French colonial empire expanded beyond Algeria. I challenge this consensus by showing how speakers outside French space learned the language in a much earlier period. Shared communications in French created a long-lasting form of social cohesion that stretched across national and imperial borders. The project will lead to two peer-reviewed articles on the ways that various groups used French in three locations: Haiti, Germany, and Russia. My grant will give me new skills in the Russian language and quantitative discourse analysis, which will be applied to conduct research in German, French, Luxembourgish, and American archives. A secondment in France will allow me to attend French cultural events in Paris before returning to Trier to meet Institut Français officials working in Frankfurt and Luxembourg. A writing project developed out of these meetings will communicate the global significance of my research. By uncovering the polyvocal origins of global francophonie, I demonstrate the importance of multilingualism for a cosmopolitan European identity today.

PAPA will rewrite significantly the story of the emergence of modern politics, re-evaluate Ancien Régime society, and re-assess the origins of the French Revolution. To do so, it will develop a new way to look at the rise of the public sphere in the 18th century. The focus is on the study of political pamphlets: 1) the PI and his team will establish a new paradigm in the research on illegally published writings, and 2) develop a database that will open tremendous new possibilities for future research in intellectual and political history. 1) According to the dominant narrative, early modern France experienced a growth of state authority, and a decline of aristocratic power. While earlier royal authority was allegedly sacral, the Enlightenment era is presented as an epoch that witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie and gave birth to a new criticism of both aristocracy and absolutism. The French Revolution is supposedly the result of these long-term processual changes. PAPA will question major theses of 17th- and 18th-century studies supporting this narrative, and develop new venues of research in these fields. PAPA’s main hypotheses are that a) courtiers shaped the 18th-century public sphere in a crucial way, b) 18th-century society and politics show more continuities than ruptures to the 17th century, and c) the French Revolution had at its inception much more in common with 17th-century princely uprisings than has been hitherto recognised. 2) The PAPA research team will create the first database devoted to Ancien Régime pamphlets. As several humanities and social sciences have a keen interest in these sources, the significance of PAPA goes largely beyond historical studies. The PAPA database will enable ongoing analyses of the content of these sources. This will greatly facilitate future research on Ancien Régime France and make scholarly results accessible within and outside academia.