ERC Consolidator Grant 2023
The MANTRATANTRAM project (“Monsoon Asia as the Nexus for the Transfer of Tantra along the Maritime routes”) led by Andrea Acri is the winner of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2023 of the Horizon Europe program. The European Research Council has awarded the project a significant sum of 1,972,125 euros.
In synergy with the MANTRAMS project, itself a winner of the ERC Synergy Grants 2023, MANTRATANTRAM aims to conduct an in-depth study of Tantrism, focusing on the cultural interactions of communities in the geo-environmental region known as “Monsoon Asia” (India, mainland Southeast Asia and Southeast peninsulas and archipelagos). Taking a global rather than a fragmented approach, MANTRATANTRAM seeks to highlight the complexity and richness of Tantrism, still too often reduced to a form of sexual practice. For a better understanding of the circulation of this movement, which dominated a vast part of Asia between the 7th and 14th centuries, numerous textual corpora in Sanskrit, Indian vernaculars, Old Javanese and Chinese will be compared.
With EPHE – PSL involved as “Host Institution“, the project team will comprise Andrea Acri (as “Principal Investigator“), four post-doctoral researchers, two PhD students and a digital humanities engineer. Scientific deliverables will include a database (VASTRA: Vernacular And Sanskrit Tantra Research Archive), an interactive website, as well as monographs, edited volumes, a “Tantric Reader“, and scientific articles. (Quotation from the press release published online by EPHE-PSL on 23 November 2023)