About

PROJECT AT-A-GLANCE

MANTRAMS “Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia”

ERC Synergy Grant 101118934

Finnian M. Moore Gerety, Senior Research Fellow in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, is a Principal Investigator on an international team that has been awarded the prestigious Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). MANTRAMS brings the first-ever Synergy Grant to the Humanities Division at Oxford, as well as one of the largest single awards given to humanities research globally. The six-year project will be jointly hosted by the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and the University of Tübingen, with additional hosting by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. This funding will support postdoctoral positions, doctoral students, conferences, and an array of high-impact deliverables, including digital archives, a podcast series, and museum exhibition.

ERC Synergy Grant; 37 total grants awarded in 2024, success rate = 9%  

Total award for MANTRAMS project: 9.65 million euros

Duration: six years, launched in September 2024

MANTRAMS Core Team

  • 3 Principal Investigators:

Finnian Moore Gerety, University of Oxford

Carola Lorea, University of Tübingen

Borayin Larios, University of Vienna

  • 1 Senior Researcher: Andrea Acri, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
  • 1 Lead Researcher: Gudrun Bühnemann, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Project description

Everyday, tens of millions of people use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, and powerful syllables—in ritual, meditation, yoga, and healing. Articulated in Sanskrit and other Indic languages, mantras originated in the religious traditions of early India and then spread via practitioners, inscriptions, manuscripts, and iconography throughout Asia and around the world. While speech and sound are central to mantra practices, mantras take a range of material forms: they may be chanted aloud, contemplated in silence, inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and textiles; mantras also circulate widely online and in digital media. Funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, MANTRAMS is the first-ever, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present. Radically interdisciplinary and comparative, the project will produce a history and anthropology of mantras, including extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives. This ambitious undertaking will investigate mantras across millennia and around the world, examining the roots of mantra in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global spiritualities today.

Funder acknowledgement

This project is funded by the European Union, supported by a Horizon Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC, MANTRAMS, project number 101118934). Views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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