Two UB researchers receive a Consolidator Grant to develop their research projects

Diana Berruezo-Sánchez is a Ramón y Cajal researche fellow at the Faculty of Philology and Communication of the University of Barcelona. She has received a €1.77 million grant to conduct her research on “the cultural legacy of the sub-Saharan diaspora in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Iberia ”. The Cultural History of the Black African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain project (BADEMS) connects Cultural History, Literature, Linguistics and Black Studies to “challenge the understanding of Europeʼs past”, says Berruezo, who adds: “It will narrate an untold story of both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage that black Africans created, primarily but not exclusively as singers, dancers, actors, and storytellers. BADEMS will build a unique open-access archive and “produce an interdisciplinary narrative about the contributions of black women and men to the literary, and linguistic culture of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”.

Judith Domínguez Borràs, tenure-track 1 lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and member of the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBNeuro), will study the existence in humans of a potential neural pathway for detecting dangers that would connect the auditory system with the amygdala, the main structure of fear processing. The project Uncovering the human subcortical pathway for auditory threat detection (HumanSUBthreat), funded with €1.9 million, aims to join “the auditory system in the current models of emotional processing, which would help to understand some clinical conditions currently known to be related to a dysfunction in the visual homologue pathway, such as anxiety or schizophrenia”. 

In this Consolidator Grants call, a total of 321 researchers have been selected for a global funding of €657 million.