The ERC-funded project MELT: Macroevolution of European Literature will study the macroevolution of European literature, focusing on the overarching patterns of intertextual influences in literary fiction written in all major European languages between 1800 and 2000. This ambitious research project will draw on the HathiTrust digital library, an unprecedented resource comprising more than 10 million digitized books, combined with advanced computational text analysis methods and novel mathematical models of cultural evolution.
The ERC Starting Grants program provides funding for research projects with a maximum budget of €1.5 million over a period of up to five years.
Oleg Sobchuk studies the cultural evolution of arts at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He discovers and explains long-term patterns in the history of books, movies, songs, video games, and other art forms with the goal to help building a theory-driven quantitative history of culture. For this, Oleg analyzes large digital libraries and artistic datasets (such as IMDb or Spotify), uses statistical models and text mining.
Oleg Sobchuk studied literature at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. In 2018, he received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Tartu, having conducted some of his research at the Stanford Literary Lab. His dissertation offered a new theoretical framework for the study of art history by combining the theory of cultural evolution with large-scale datasets of literature and the arts. He continued this line of work during his two postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
- Find all ERC Starting Grants 2025 here
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology: Charting the evolution of European literature
- Web-site of Oleg Sobchuk
Some other news on ERC awardees of Ukrainian origin can be found here