Far from being a recent phenomenon, our notion of depression is the late 19th century successor of something that has been studied for around two thousand years: melancholy. Contemporary problems surrounding our notion of depression call for an evaluation of these studies on melancholy. Two aspects integral to the traditional understanding of melancholy have been lost in the recent translation from melancholy to depression: 1. The embeddedness of melancholy in human nature. From Galen onwards, melancholy was thought to be caused by a substance that was in itself a normal part of our constitution, but that needed to be adequately managed. This made it possible to conceptualize melancholy as something that is both natural and in need of careful management because of its potential harmfulness. 2. The capacities associated with melancholy. Throughout its history, melancholy was associated not only with the decrease of certain capacities, but also with the enhancement of specific, other capacities. I propose to study melancholy in ancient and medieval thought between Galen and the Renaissance (roughly from the end of the 2nd until the 15th century) from the perspective of these two aspects, in order to contribute to our contemporary understanding of mild depression.

How European welfare states will develop is hard to predict. Peoples current aspirations, ideas and assumptions will be important drivers of change and persistence and of the extent to which conflict and solidarity surround change. This project uses innovative methods (deliberative democratic forums, a qualitative cross-national focus group survey) to develop understanding of peoples aspirations for the Europe their children will inhabit. The interactive and discursive methods proposed deal directly with peoples ideas, but are rarely used in comparative welfare studies. The project is essentially forward-looking. It will contribute to theoretical work on the main cleavages and solidarities driving social policy in different European welfare states and to more practical consideration of the parameters of acceptable policy change. It will supply new findings relevant to the politics and sociology of welfare and provide data for reanalysis and as a base-line in future studies. The team has led major cross-national projects and will press home findings in national and EU-level policy debate.

Since the 1990s scholars of early modern Europe have convincingly demonstrated the resilience of the European nobility’s political influence over time. Yet they continue to approach the ‘family’ as an irrational social system for the exercise of power. This project turns that assumption on its head and explores the crucial importance of the wider family for the exercise and transmission of power. Using a conceptual framework developed in business studies, I will explore the ‘corporate culture’ of the Nassau family in the period 1550-1815 and, in doing so, develop a new model for writing dynastic history. The working hypothesis of ‘The Nassaus’ is that the Nassau dynasty cultivated a corporate culture as a family, which in the most ideal circumstances: 1) created continuity and loyalty, 2) ensured the transmission of social, cultural and economic capital, and 3) facilitated the transmission of important networks. Conversely, failure to integrate all voices of the family beneficiaries in this corporate culture jeopardized the future of the dynasty. To test this hypothesis, I will explore the corporate strategies that the Nassaus developed and deployed for the transmission of power, property, titles, know-how, religion and networks, and ask why and under what circumstances these strategies contributed, or failed to contribute, to the long-term survival of the different Nassau branches. ‘The Nassaus’ is innovative in adopting the concept of corporate culture as a new model to understand princely power in the early modern period, taking a long-term transnational perspective with attention to the ‘dead ends’ rather than just presenting the family as a Dutch ‘success’, and deploying little-used source material in a new way to explore the dynasty’s failures and successes.

The 1970s was a crucial decade for LGBTQ culture and politics, lying between the advent of an international gay rights movement in the 1960s and the impact of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Across Europe, LGBTQ people began to collectively discuss the broader ramifications of their sexual and gender identities, and to fight against persecution and discrimination. This was accompanied by a proliferation of social spaces, sexual interactions, and cultural production. In the face of ongoing homophobia and human rights struggles, Cruising the 1970s (CRUSEV) asks: how might we best reconstruct and comprehend European LGBTQ experiences of the 1970s, and what can this knowledge contribute to understandings of queer politics and identity in Europes present and future? Deploying a broad array of methodological approaches including archival investigation, interviews, and the production of original artworks, research teams in Germany, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom will explore their distinct and shared histories collaboratively. Through a programme of events (including workshops, symposia, and exhibitions) and a set of shared themes (such as oral history, local organizing, and visual arts), the research teams will meet regularly to exchange their findings with each other and a variety of stakeholders. CRUSEV aims to unearth traces of queer culture and interaction from this relatively recent era, especially those that were evanescent and are in danger of disappearing. It will uncover imagined versions of the queer future, dreamed of by artists and activists in the 1970s, which were explored but abandoned. Simultaneously, standard historical accounts of the gay liberation of the 1970s will be interrogated: what alternate versions of the queer 1970s have been sidelined, and with what effects? All of these materials and insights will be shared widely, in order to provoke a political reconsideration of what it means to be LGBTQ in Europe in the present.