Projects

The “Dissident Networks Project” (DISSINET), funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant for 2021-2026 and previously supported by an EXPRO grant from the Czech Science Foundation (2019-2021), explores dissident religious cultures in medieval Europe through various techniques of computational modelling. It uses social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis to shed new light on the social, spatial, and discursive patterns of medieval dissident Christianities, on inquisitorial trials and records and, by extension, on medieval social networks, the functioning of covert networks, and the emergence of religion from local interactions.

The “Generative Historiography of Religion” Project (GEHIR) applies innovative methods used in the study of the dynamics of complex systems to the historiography of ancient Graeco-Roman religions. Through focused case studies, this initiative envisions the enrichment of research into several religious traditions of the ancient Mediterranean – Isiac cults, early Christianities, Hellenistic Judaism, and Mithraism – as well as the exploration of formalized modelling approaches in historiography and the study of religions.

The “Cultural Evolution of Moralizing Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean” Project (CEMRAM) explores the question of whether the emergence of moralizing religions resulted from shifts in life-history strategies in response to the increase in economic prosperity. The project applies the methods of distant reading to analyze the spatial and temporal relationships between occurrences of moralizing religion motifs in digitized corpora of ancient texts and inscriptions in Greek and Latin on the one hand and the level of affluence based on socio-economic proxy data on the other.