The European Research Council (ERC) recently awarded two Advanced Grants, worth 2.5 million euros each, to project directed by Mónica Bolufer, in the Social and Humanities area. This is the first time that a Social Sciences ERC Advanced Grant is obtained in the Valencian Community.

Advanced Grants are the largest grants awarded by the European Research Council as support for projects at the frontier of knowledge led by senior researchers. They last five years and can contemplate any area of knowledge.

Mónica Bolufer is a Modern History professor at the University of Valencia and a researcher at the University Institute for Women’s Studies. Specialized in social, cultural and gender history, she will devote the aid to the study of gender models in eighteenth-century Europe and its colonial territories; a transnational and transatlantic approach to the circulation of these models, overcoming national or merely comparative approaches and situating in the historiographic map the Enlightenment in the Hispanic empire. The project, which also includes Contemporary History professor Isabel Burdiel, examines the transfers in the fields of translation, sociability, travel, reading and the culture of sensitivity, from an approach that puts the emphasis on the capacity for action of the subjects and the complex legacy of the Enlightenment to modernity.

It is the first time that a researcher from the University of Valencia obtains an ERC Advanced and this is the first scholarship of this type, in Social Sciences and Humanities, that reaches the Valencian Community.

The Advanced Grant aid program of the European Research Council has been contributing to the development of excellent and highly innovative projects for ten years. It started in 2008 and since then it has financed 118 initiatives ‒ 9 of which are Valencian ones ‒ led by researchers who carry out their work in Spanish centres. The tenth edition of the call (2017) has been the most productive for science in Spain and also for the University of Valencia, which has achieved two of the Advanced Grant awards granted to Spanish centres and universities.

ERC grants allow excellent scientists to execute their best ideas and generate jobs by hiring researchers from the benefitted scientific teams.

Mónica Bolufer

Professor in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the University of Valencia, she works in sociocultural history and history of women in modern times, particularly in the eighteenth century. Among her interests and research objects are the representation of gender difference in the Enlightenment culture, female writing and reading practices, family history, conceptions of intimacy, privacy and the public sphere, the moral regulation of customs (civility, hygiene), in the context of the process of modernisation of Spanish society and of the cultural relations between Spain and Europe "In the century of Enlightenment". She has published several books and numerous articles in national and international journals on these issues.

She has held several internships as a researcher and guest lecturer at other Spanish and foreign academic centers, including the École des Hautes Études in Social Sciences of Paris, the University of Franche Comté, the Royal Holloway College-University of London, the European University Institute and the University of Cambridge.