The theory of computability was launched in the 1930s by a group of logicians who proposed new characterizations of the ancient idea of an algorithmic process. The theoretical and philosophical work that these thinkers carried out laid the foundations for the computer revolution, and this revolution in turn fuelled the fantastic expansion of scientific knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

The 1930s revolution was a critical moment in the history of science: ideas conceived at that time have become cornerstones of current science and technology. Since then, many diverse computational paradigms have blossomed, and still others are the object of current theoretical enquiry - massively parallel and distributed computing, quantum computing, real-time interactive asynchronous computing, relativistic computing, hypercomputing, nano-computing, DNA computing, neuron-like computing, computing over the reals, computing involving quantum random-number generators. The list goes on; few of these forms of computation were even envisaged during the 1930s' analysis of computability.

The fundamental question tackled by the group is: do the concepts introduced by the early pioneers provide the logico-mathematical foundation for what we call computing today, or is there a need to overhaul the foundations of computing to fit the twenty-first century?

This interdisciplinary research project is exploring the performance of prayer, liturgy, and hymns among a variety of Eastern and Western Christian traditions from the end of Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Focusing on the history and environments of worship shifts the emphasis in the comparative study of Christianity beyond the history of doctrine.

The timeline extended from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 - when the great division between Eastern Christianities took place - to the eleventh century, just before the cultural upheaval brought about by the Crusades. The geographical framework includes Christianity's religious centers - Palestine, Constantipole, and Rome - and its periphery - East Syria and Medieval France. New models of piety, the ways in which people imagined their interaction with the divine, and the rise of asceticism in the late antique Mediterranean world brought forth new conceptions and patterns of worship. Novel religious performances played a vital role in shaping Christian identities in Byzantium and the Latin West as well as encoding specific poetics and theories of how religion should function. Bringing together historians of religion, art, architecture, and music, the project is focused on religious performance as a way to re-narrate the history of Christian religious culture in the East and West in its social and intellectual contexts.

Dandin’s Mirror of Poetry (Kāvyādarśa), a Sanskrit work on poetics composed in South India around 700 CE, is one of the most influential treatises ever produced in Asia.

The work was translated and adapted into a variety of languages in the south of the Indian peninsula and the island of Sri Lanka (Kannada, Tamil, Sinhala, and Pali), travelled to Southeast Asia (Burma and Indonesia), was repeatedly translated in northern and central Asia (Tibet and Mongolia), and may even have exercised influence on poetic praxis in China. Moreover, it is hard to overstate the profound impact of Dandin’s Mirror, which, in distant corners of Asia and at different times, consistently emboldened new literary beginnings.