The Arctic has risen to global attention in recent years, as it has been reconfigured through debates about global environmental change, resource extraction and disputes over sovereign rights. Within these discourses, little attention has been paid to the cultures of the Arctic. Indeed, it often seems as if the Circumpolar Arctic in global public understanding remains framed as a 'natural region' - that is, a place where the environment dominates the creation of culture. This framing has consequences for the region, because through this the Arctic becomes constructed as a space where people are absent. This proposal aims to discover how and why this might be so. The proposal argues that this construction of the Arctic emerged from the exploration of the region by Europeans and North Americans and their contacts with indigenous people from the middle of the eighteenth century. Particular texts, cartographic representations and objects were collected and returned to sites like London, Copenhagen, Berlin and Philadelphia. The construction of the Arctic thereby became entwined within the growth of colonial museum cultures and, indeed, western modernity. This project aims to delineate the networks and collecting cultures involved in this creation of Arctic Cultures. It will bring repositories in colonial metropoles into dialogue with sites of collection in the Arctic by tracing the contexts of discovery and memorialisation. In doing so, it aspires to a new understanding of the consequences of certain forms of colonial representation for debates about the Circumpolar Arctic today. The project involves research by the Principal Investigator and four Post Doctoral Researchers at museums, archives, libraries and repositories across Europe and North America, as well as in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. A Project Assistant based in Oxford will help facilitate the completion of the research.

We propose to study turbulence and mixing in stably stratified fluid. Mixing is central to a wide range of questions from the heat uptake in the global ocean, the transport and dilution of pollutants in the atmosphere, the efficient cooling of buildings, to the homogenising of products in the food industry. However, the mechanisms that are responsible and their physical and dynamical aspects are largely unknown, and it is not possible to predict mixing rates from a knowledge of the overall flow and density fields. We have invented a new laboratory experiment that produces a maintained stratified shear flow in parameter ranges directly applicable to the situations described above. The experiment, consisting of a two-layer counterflow in a stratified inclined duct, is easy to use and highly flexible. A rich variety of flows from transitional, to spatial and temporal intermittent flow, to fully turbulent flow are obtained, and can be maintained for long times to explore the life-cycles of the turbulence. We have also developed a unique capability to make near-instantaneous, highly spatially resolved, measurements of all three components of velocity and the density field over a volume. This capability allows, for the first time in a laboratory experiment, measurements of all the quantities of interest over a three-dimensional region. In addition we have a computational code with which we will carry out direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the experiments over a limited region of parameter space. We will use data from the experiments as initial conditions for the DNS, and compare the time evolution of the flow in the computations and the experiments. We will then use the experiments to extrapolate the results to the full scale. This study, using the new experiment and diagnostics and state-of-the-art computations, will provide new insights into the dynamics of stratified turbulence and set the standard for future studies of this problem.

FAMWAR investigates how the familial experience of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was represented in the cultural production of the first four and a half decades of the Third Republic. The years 2014-18 have seen a vast reflection on the European experience of the First World War. One of the most successful aspects of this has been the way more traditional military and diplomatic history has dovetailed with the modern concerns of cultural, social and gender history. It is the aim of FAMWAR to apply these insights to what might be termed "the war before the First World War", namely the Franco-Prussian War. Fought almost exclusively on French soil, the war was a traumatic experience for France, not just politically (with the fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire; the birth of the Third Republic in September 1870, which would last until the Second World War; and the civil war of the Paris Commune in 1871), but also socially (in the two sieges of Paris, and in the battlefield experience and its effects on the provincial population). Wars, we know from the twentieth-century experience of two world wars, involve on all sides the mass separation, damage and reconfiguration of families; and in particular, the shifting of gender relations in and beyond the family. It is precisely the intensity of the twentieth-century European experience of war which has turned 1870-71 into what has been called "the forgotten war". Yet 1870-71 represents a key foundational moment in the invention of modern Europe (when France finally embraced republicanism for good, and Germany was born as a nation-state). How, we shall ask, was the family's experience of this war remembered in literature, journalism and iconography? It is the aim of the current project to correct that oversight, not least as the 150th anniversary of the war approaches, and not least because it is the experience of the Franco-Prussian War which French and German people carried, within living memory, into war in 1914.

Legal theorists have long argued that law is more than enforcement, i.e. rather than being just an externally observed phenomenon, that it involves a cognitive element on the part of participants in the practice. The dominant accounts of this cognitive element divide into those—within the law and economics paradigm—that see it as a cost-benefit analysis and others—in the natural law tradition—that conflate it with morality. Recent evidence suggests, however, that the picture is more complex: neither are human beings as relentlessly self-interested as they are parodied to be as the homo economicus of rational-choice theory nor do they possess unlimited altruism. But there has been very little systematic inquiry—certainly of an empirical nature—into the question: what are the cognitive foundations of law— as a mode of cooperation—that make it distinct from other institutions? This project will attempt to fill that gap by trying to understand the relationship between decision-making at the individual level, group behaviour and social outcomes—focusing, in particular, on the role of trust and the notion of community in mediating these relationships, and the point at which social norms “tip” into law. Joining the dots between behavioural law and economics, moral psychology, legal theory and economic sociology, it will draw on the range of methodologies currently in use in the American Empirical Legal Studies tradition (with a focus on behavioural techniques) and extend current practice by developing an approach specifically adapted to legal scholarship. This ground breaking research will seek to stretch the boundaries of current knowledge—in disciplinary, methodological and, ultimately, theoretical terms— through pioneering approaches to the empirical study of law and thereby contribute to real world change in the way that law and legal systems function, with implications for development, climate change, regional alliances and a range of other key challenges.

Over the past decades, significant advances have been achieved in the performance of Li-ion batteries by the development of new active materials and better understanding of energy storage and degradation mechanisms. One aspect of batteries that has received little attention so far, is the form factor of the electrodes. However, simple changes in the battery architecture, such as increasing the coating thickness, allows to drastically decrease the relative fraction of dead volume in the battery (e.g. separators and current collectors). Theoretically, it is possible to replace a stack of ten standard 50 µm thick electrode coatings by one 500 µm thick coating. This would result in up to 30% savings in weight as well as volume of the battery, and would be transformative for both portable electronics and electrical vehicles. However, this is fundamentally challenging because of 1) slow ion diffusion through thick electrodes, 2) high electric resistance through the thickness of the electrode, and 3) cracking and flaking challenges during the fabrication of thick electrodes. This MSCA Fellowship is building on novel gel electrodes developed by the applicant, which can be moulded into 3D geometries that allow to move away from the current flat battery morphology and to address the above challenges with thick battery electrodes. During this Fellowship, the dynamics of ion and electron transport in thick 3D interdigitated electrodes will first be simulated. Then, the electrochemical performance of the gels will be optimised, in particular, a phase separation method to improve Li-diffusion will be optimised. Next, the thermal moulding process will be optimised to create interdigitated electrodes which will be tested in half and full cells. Finally, the proposed fabrication process will be demonstrated on a roll-to-roll coater, which is important to prove its scalability to industrial stakeholders.