The Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR), the Centre for Applied Neuroscience (CAN), and the Discourse, Context, and Society Lab (DISCONSO) at the University of Cyprus (UCY) invite expressions of interest for applications for the ONISILOS Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) COFUND project. CeMAR, CAN, and DISCONSO will jointly mentor and support selected eligible candidates with a background in medieval studies and/or cognitive neuroscience in preparing an application for an Individual Fellowship. All supported applications will have to be on topics that fall within the theme of medieval emotions and cognitive neuroscience.

The study of emotions is a relatively recent turn in Medieval Studies but it’s been attracting plenty of interest over the last few years. Medievalists are drawing on various methods and fields to decipher and understand medieval emotions: philosophy, linguistics, literary analysis, and feminist criticism, among many others. However, the limitations of such approaches are becoming evident. This joint proposal for expressioning of interest stresses the need for dialogue and collaboration between Humanities scholars and Cognitive Neuroscientists.

Cognitive Neuroscience assigns brain activity metrics to understand specific representations of the outer world better. Humanities study the many ways the world is represented in language, art and literature, and their effects and purposes. Research into emotion representations and the exploration of neuropsychological understanding of emotions will benefit from a fruitful collaboration between the Humanities and Cognitive Neuroscience. New avenues previously foreclosed by unilateral thinking will thus be explored. As part of this dialogue, medievalists and linguists will be able to explore medieval emotional experiences in more profound ways; and neuroscientists will feed methods used by the Humanities back into their own work. This approach is expected to add to the rapidly developing literature studying how medieval emotions can be explored with the contribution of Linguistics (including corpus linguistics and discourse analysis) and Cognitive Neuroscience.

MSCA Individual Fellowships are open to applications from individuals with a doctoral degree in Medieval Studies or at least four years of full-time research experience by the time of the call deadline. Cognitive Neuroscience applicants must have documented expertise in neural signal processing and modelling, neuromodulation and relevant research in signal processing. The grant provides an allowance (1 or 2 years) to cover living, travel and family costs. In addition, the EU contributes to the training, networking and research costs of the fellow and the management and indirect costs of the project. The grant is awarded to the host organization. The application consists of a research proposal written jointly with the host organization.