Sapienza University was awarded five 2022 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships within the new Horizon Europe framework programme.

The total funding of 1,154,930.85 euros will cover projects of excellence, the recruitment of talented researchers and the consolidation of significant national and international collaborations.

The winning projects, as listed below, cover different disciplinary fields and will be carried out by the Departments of Physics, History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts and Ancient World Studies.

The MGELS project, presented by Susana Marín Aguilar and Emanuela Zaccarelli from the Departments of Physics, will study the structure and physical properties of soft materials consisting of cross-linked polymer networks that show incredible responsiveness to external stimuli, together with interesting elastic properties. By using new machine learning technologies, the project aims to predict these materials' structure and physical properties, in particular microgels and hydrogels, using only the information derived from the preparation protocol and initial components.

Folie, presented by Maria Fallica and Gaetano Lettieri of the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts, aims to study how Erasmus and other key figures of the Renaissance, influenced by Erasmus and belonging to the same theological tradition, such as Margaret of Navarre and Louise Labé, used the mask of Folly as a tool to express and reveal truths, such as the revolutionary message of the Gospel, and to allow female expression. This approach will allow the researchers to redefine the construction of the 'feminine' in the European Renaissance, focusing on the Italian and French context, reflecting the revelatory value of the 'fool', interpreted from a theological point of view as the language of simple and scandalous truths.

The ForM project, presented by Annunziata Di Rienzo and Alberto Camplani of the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts, aims to analyse the circumstances and reasons why, according to some sources, during the 4th and 5th centuries, the Church of Late Antique Iran turned to the Western Church for political support and religious legitimisation. The study wishes to clarify to what extent and in what way ideological and literary reworking influences the representation of this relationship, what narrative tools were adopted, and what role certain forged documents played in this narrative.

The MATCH project, presented by Aviad Agam and Cristina Lemorini from the Department of Ancient World Studies, aims to study fire management in prehistoric times. The timing of human fire management is a central theme in the debate on Palaeolithic archaeology. The ability to use fire had a decisive impact on the development of technologies and was considered to be a determining factor for migrations, in particular for the movement of prehistoric humans from Africa to the colder climate of Europe. However, given the scant evidence of fire use in Europe before 400,000 years ago, it has been deduced that humans occupied this continent without knowing how to use fire. The archaeological record for the Italian territory also seems to confirm this hypothesis, with evidence of fire use only in the Middle Palaeolithic period. The project will explore the possibility of human-operated fire in Italy during the Acheulian culture in the Lower Palaeolithic, using the analysis of clothing through FT-IR and UV-Raman spectroscopy and palaeomagnetism.

Over the past decade, creatives referring to indigenous and queer cultures have developed collaborative artistic strategies that transcend geopolitical boundaries, aimed at mobilising global solidarity as a 'double minority' living in occupied lands. Fashion has become a site of resistance against colonialism, environmental racism, authoritarianism, homobitransfobia and human rights violations. Starting from these premises, Roberto Filippello and Romana Andò's project, from the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts, examines three main locations - Palestine, Australia and Canada - mapping the rise of a new wave of fashion creators producing clothes as a cooperative queer world-building strategy, analysing how these creative practices activate social transformation in a material sense, through the production of ethical clothing, and in the digital context through the media by spreading the message of sustainable fashion.