Category Archives: opportunities and projects

Posted on

CfP for PhD students and postdocs on Yogācāra Buddhism in Context

I received this email from Constanze Pabst von Ohain and Marco Walther

Within the scope of the Doctoral Program in Buddhist Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, we announce our upcoming workshop “Yogācara Buddhism in Context: Approaches to Yogācāra Philosophy throughout Ages and Cultures”.

Please find attached a call for papers for PhD students/postdocs and further information that you can forward to any parties that might be interested.

We are looking forward to receiving applications.

Abstract submission deadline: 31. December 2014.

CfP LMU 2015 Yogacara Buddhism

Posted on

Call for Proposals: The Gonda Fund for Indology

The Gonda Fund for Indology awards fellowships to promising young Indologists at post-doctorate level, that enable them to spend one to six months at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands.
The Gonda Fund also offers funding for publications and research projects in Sanskrit or other Indian languages and literatures, and in Indian cultural history.
The deadlines to apply for a fellowship or for funding of a research project or publication are 1 April and 1 October of every year.The Gonda Fund is a foundation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
More information is available at www.knaw.nl/gonda-fund.

Posted on

Where to publish a book on Sanskrit (or) Philosophy?

Where should one publish one’s book? What are advantages and disadvantages of each venue? I will start sharing my views and would be glad to read yours (PLEASE NOTE that I cannot be exhaustive and in this sense I depend on my readers —suggest further venues or important points, if you deem them relevant).

Please remember that I am speaking about young authors (well-known ones will not need me).

Posted on

Funding your research projects: some data

(This post is a continuation of my post of last week and gives some better grounded data.)

If you are a scholar active in Europe, you will most probably depend on funding for your projects in order to survive, given that surviving out of teaching alone is infrequent and a tenure is not foreseeable. Thus, it becomes essential to know what one’s chances are.
A short comparison shows that among European countries,

  • Switzerland is the one in which more money for research is granted (total amount/number of inhabitants): 88,5 E pro inhabitant each year
  • Finnland is the next one: 61,1 E
  • UK (Research Council UK): 48,0 E
  • Neatherlands (NWO): 37,2 E
  • Germany (DFG): 33,5 E
  • Austria (FWF): 23,8 E

This is however still not enough, since a lot depends on how many funding agencies there are in each country, so that, e.g., the situation may look different in Germany if one takes into account also the Humboldt scholarships, the Max Planck foundation, etc.

Moreover, the amount of money available per inhabitant still does not say much, since it is not said how many inhabitants apply for that money. In this sense, it seems that the acceptance rate of the German DFG is much lower than expected, whereas the Swiss acceptance rate is high, as expected:

  • Swiss acceptance rate: around 50%
  • Austrian acceptance rate: 25,8%
  • German (DFG only) acceptance rate: around 17%

Still more interesting, especially for prospective peer reviewers are the following data:

  • acceptance rate in 2008 (Austria, FWF): 43,0% (2008 was the highest peak attained, before that the rate was around 41,5%)
  • acceptance rate in 2013 (Austria, FWF): 25,8%

Why this huge difference in a few years? Because the number of application has been incredibly growing (from 1,000 in 2001 to 2,386 in 2013).
This means that the lower acceptance rate is not due to the lower quality of post-2008 projects. Rather, after 2008 the FWF Jury (and I imagine that a similar situation applies to the DFG and similar fundings) just had to look for weak points in each project in order “not to go bankrupt” (precise quotation of what I heard at a recent FWF roadshow).
Given that the decision about a project is taken in Austria, Germany and Italy (I guess that the same applies to the other EU countries, but I cannot be sure) by a jury or committee on the basis of peer-reviews, much burden lies on the peer reviewers themselves.
Again, as I heard at the same roadshow:

We are forced to look for anything which looks like a critique, if we want not to go bankrupt. We know we are turning down projects we would be funding in better financial conditions.

There is nothing blamable in that, but I am convinced that peer reviewers should be informed about the weight of their decisions. Anything less than “enthusiastic approval” amounts to good news for the committee, who can turn down the project. It is fine, if you think the project not to be worthy, but I, for one, will send my further suggestions directly to the applicant and not include them in my peer review the next time I am asked to review a project.

What will you do? What have you done until now?
Source: FWF

Posted on

A non-funded project on deontic logic —And some general notes on peer-reviewing projects

Some months ago, departing from Decemeber 2013, I started working on a fascinating project, the formalisation of the deontic logic of some Mīmāṃsā authors (Kumārila, Prabhākara and Maṇḍana). Given that I am not an expert on formal logic, the project has been conceived together with some colleagues working on formal logic and on the IT tools for automating it. After some preliminary work, we submitted a project within the “Mathematics and…” call of the WWTF. The other principal investigator was Agata Ciabattoni and the other collaborators were Björn Lellmann and Ekaterina Lebedeva. Agata and Björn would have been working with me on selecting the logical rules from the relevant Sanskrit texts, translating them in formal logical language and developing automated deduction methods to reason about them.
Ekaterina, as a linguist and an expert of the intersection of language and logic, would have taken care of the fact that our translations of Sanskrit passages into logical rules did not entail logical ambiguities.

EAAA on reuse in visual arts

As you migh already know, I am leaving tomorrow for Olomouc where I will host on Friday the 26th with Julia Hegewald and Cristina Bignami a panel on reuse in visual arts. Here is the program of our panel:

Title: Re-use at the Borders of South Asia: Himalayas and South India
9-9:30 Elisa FRESCHI “Reuse in Texts and the Arts: The case of Hayagrīva’s Descriptions”
9:30-10 Julia HEGEWALD “The Theory of Re-use as a Method in Art-historical Research”
10-10:30 Gerald KOZICZ “The re-use of the nidhi iconography in the Tibetan context”
10:30-11 Verena WIDORN “The use and re-use of aesthetic concepts in the Himalayan area”
BREAK
11:30-12 Cristina BIGNAMI “The re-use of the iconography of the lion/tiger in the Karṇataka Medieval sovereignty
12-12:30 Tiziana LORENZETTI “Appropriation and re-interpretation of symbolic and architectural elements in the Lingayat religiosity”
12:30-13: Mallica KUMBERA LANDRUS “Sharing and reshaping collective memories in Portuguese Goa”
LUNCH + TOUR etc.
17-17:30 Elena MUCCIARELLI “The Plucking of different flowers: Re-use in Kerala theatrical tradition”
17:30-18 concluding session: DISCUSSION

Should you come to the conference, don’t forget to join the discussion (or to join me for a coffee break).

CfP: Language as a tools for acquiring Knowledge (Atiner conference)

If you have been following this blog or my previous one you will know that I have been looking for chances for cross-cultural philosophy since many years. You will also know that I have been thinking at the Atiner Conference as a good chance to discuss about Indian themes as part of Philosophy tout court and not within the small ghetto of Indian Philosophy for Indologists.

This year, Malcolm C. Keating (University of Texas, Austin) and I will be hosting a panel at the next Atiner conference in Athens, 25–28 May 2015. If you are interested to join, read the following CfP and drop a line either in the comments or at my personal address. (more…)

Comparison and Comparative Method —The sixth Coffee Break Conference: CfP

The Coffee Break Conference began as an attempt to encourage the kind of critical and open-ended discussions that have unfortunately been confined to short coffee breaks at most academic conferences. Coffee Break Conferences give scholars the opportunity to critically discuss their work, especially new work, in an interdisciplinary setting. Discussions at these conferences have tended to focus on scholarly methodology and all types of comparisons: between areas of study, between the approaches of different disciplines, between the concepts and vocabulary of different traditions of scholarship.

The next Coffee Break Conference, to be held in Venice on September 10-12 2015, will directly take up the theme of comparison. In a series of panels, including a conference-wide roundtable session, we will discuss the form that comparison takes in scholarly work, what its advantages and liabilities are, and the philosophical and political issues that comparison raises. Scholars are invited to submit papers to one of the proposed panels, listed below, or to propose a panel on the theme of comparison. Younger scholars are encouraged to participate.

The current plan of the conference, subject to modification, is as follows:

1) Linguistic Selves: Language and Identity in the Premodern World (contact person: Andrew Ollett, andrew.ollett@gmail.com)

2) 1) From cross-cultural comparison to shared epistemic spaces: educating desire in the “medieval” epistemic space (contact person: Marco Lauri, marco.f.lauri@gmail.com)

3) The “Religion” Challenge: Comparative Religious Studies and the Trouble to Transfer Conceptional Terms from Europe to Asia (contact person: Ann-Kathrin Wolff, ann-kathrin.wolf@rub.de; Madlen Krüger, madlen.krueger@rub.de)

4) Is Theology comparable? Comparison applied to “Theology” and “God” (contact person: Elisa Freschi, elisa.freschi@gmail.com)

5) Knowing the unknown: extra-ordinary cognitions in a comparative perspective (contact person: Marco Ferrante, marco.ferrante@oeaw.ac.at)

6) The trans-cultural reshaping of psychoanalysis, or the perks of comparative psychodynamics (contact person: Daniele Cuneo, danielecuneo@hotmail.it)

Further infos on the CBCs in general and on the 2015 edition in particular can be found here: http://asiaticacoffeebreak.wordpress.com/
and here:
http://asiatica.wikispaces.com/2015+on+comparison

(The conference will most probably take place in Rome, September the 17th to 19th 2015.)

Chief of the Organizing Committee: E. Freschi, A. Ollett