History Research

Professor Samuel Cohn, of the School of Humanities is among 253 researchers named as winners of the ERC’s 2021 Advanced Grants competition.
 
ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists and scholars in any field at the career stage when they are already established research leaders, with a recognised track record of research achievements.
 
Samuel Cohn, Professor of Medieval History, will receive €2.4 million (£2m) for a five-year project, entitled ‘Art and Inequality in the Post-Black Death Century’.
 
It will combine two fields—inequality studies and art history. With three full-time postdoctoral scholars, the project will work with numerous archives to collect and analyse thousands of commissions for art in public spaces across the Italian peninsula that were initiated by peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers, c. 1280 to 1500.
 
These have been ignored by art historians and historians alike because the objects have almost totally vanished, mostly purposely destroyed. In addition to recovering a lost world, the project will broaden understanding of the cultural impact of the Black Death from a new quantitative perspective and documentation that stretches across social classes.
 
Professor Cohn said: “I am honoured to be able to embark on this project. It is a team project. Without a team, I would not have dared to confront the challenges posed by the project. Instead, I would have returned to medical history to write another single-authored monograph.”

First published: 26 April 2022