ERC Awards Starting Grant to Andrea Sangiacomo

The European Research Council has awarded Andrea Sangiacomo a Starting Grant to conduct his research on The Normalisation of Natural Philosophy: How Teaching Practices Shaped the Evolution of Early Modern Science. Sangiacomo’s application to the ERC was one of the products of his Data Science project Rewriting Nature.

In the early modern period, the conceptual framework and practices of natural philosophy were radically transformed. Sangiacomo contends that “teaching practices had a decisive and ‘normalising’ impact on the progressive dissemination, adaptation and selection of rival conceptions of natural philosophy.” The ERC project aims “to determine and explain how the process of normalisation embedded in teaching practices shaped the evolution of early modern natural philosophy,” through a combination of close reading and digital ‘distant reading’ of hundreds of works.