Rental markets face rising institutional investor presence, termed Financialization of Rental Housing (FINRENT). It is widely believed to be linked to housing affordability issues. This project quantitatively investigates the developments, patterns, and consequences of FINRENT in OECD countries and selected emerging economies, advancing housing financialization theory and ensuring housing rights.

The past persists in material objects, perhaps most profoundly in the bodies of the long-dead and the artefacts associated with them. Such bodies, like those of Richard III and Cervantes, are erupting into view in contemporary Europe with increasing frequency. Whilst offering opportunities for education and the promotion of heritage, such encounters with the dead can also pose unsettling questions about cultural identity, the collective past, and the shape of time. Why do the long-dead become flashpoints of identity for the living? Harnessing the disciplines of literature and archaeology, DEEPDEAD will examine historic and prehistoric encounters with human remains and related artefacts in England and Central Europe in order to shed light on their cultural and social power. Through a series of case studies juxtaposing distinct eras, cultures, and modes of recording the encounter, the project will reveal what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the long-dead. Our research will explore the relationship between long-dead bodies and myths of national or community origin, and the ways in which they have been used to reinforce or challenge historical narratives. The project will thus lead to a better understanding of why these forms of matter provoke such a range of responses, and how stakeholders including archaeologists, curators, policy-makers, and the public might better anticipate and understand the reactions they elicit.

The tenth century is an overlooked moment in European history. It has played an important role as a starting point for the national narratives of modern countries including England and Germany, but is often characterised as a dark age, a century of iron in which the structures of the Carolingian Empire (751-888) collapsed and the map of medieval Europe took shape in the rubble. By rejecting these stories of nations or chaos as starting points for our project, we seek to understand the tenth century on its own terms. Uses of the Past is an ideal theme for this endeavour because the absence of clear administrative or legal structures in our period meant that action in the present often drew authority and legitimacy from claims about the past. The ways that contemporaries chose to use (or not to use) the past - especially the Carolingian past - can be highly instructive to the historian. Focusing on legal, liturgical and historical attitudes to the past will therefore help us recapture the imagined landscapes of tenth-century Europe and to explore it not as a chapter in pre-ordained national narratives but as a case study in transition - an example of how people in the past dealt with crisis and rapid change in the political order. The project will produce academic articles and monographs, but will also attempt to open up the period to a broader audience by providing online resources (including images and translated texts) for teachers and general readers. To accomplish these goals, we will collaborate with schoolteachers and with museums and archives in Germany, Austria, Spain and the UK. As well as these virtual outputs, we will organise a public exhibition of related manuscripts in Catalonia.