In 2007, the European Commission established the European Research Council with the mission to encourage excellent frontier research in Europe through competitive funding, supporting top researchers across all fields and of any nationality. In 2017 the European Research Council is marking its 10th anniversary, an important milestone in making Europe a global centre of excellence in research.
The University of Oxford is the number one university recipient of ERC awards across the whole of the EU, and the Faculty of History currently holds 5 such awards, an indication of the world-class quality of our historians and their research ambitions. To celebrate this important anniversary, we have talked to those leading ERC projects in History here at Oxford, to find out what big ideas this funding is enabling them to explore, and what the ERC means to them.