Maximum grant awarded for research on corruption

• Thursday, March 12, 2020

A project focusing on corruption in Ancient Greece and Rome has been granted £349000 by the DFG-AHRC, a newly developed funding collaboration between the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation.

The new research project, "Twisted Transfers": Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Greece and Rome (2020-23), is a collaboration between the University of Roehampton and Universität Potsdam in Germany, lead by Dr Marta García Morcillo and Professor Filippo Carlà-Uhink respectively. The German side of the project has been granted an equivalent funding by the DFG. Marta is joined on the Roehampton team by Dr Shushma Malik (Co-Investigator) and Dr Yuddi Gershon (Post-doc Fellow).

This is the only Classics project to receive funding from the joint initiative between the DFG and the AHRC, which has been developed as a way of funding research collaborations between Germany and the UK within the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

The three-year interdisciplinary project will use the lens of antiquity to explore different types of transfers of material (e.g. monetary gifts) and immaterial (e.g. a recommendation) commodities in public and private life. It will seek to understand both modern society and other periods, for example, the challenge of democracy and Brexit and will consider what corruption is both from a historical and sociological perspective. Whilst based in classics, the project will bring in other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, law, politics, philosophy, theology.