INET-md achieves excellent results in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie 2025 postdoctoral fellowship competition

The two applications that INET-md supported, via NOVA FCSH, in the most recent Marie Skłodowska-Curie call for postdoctoral fellowships were successful. Researchers Sio Pan Leong and Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta competed for INET-md in this highly competitive European call, both obtaining scores above 97.5%, which placed them in a position to receive funding. Of the 16,836 applications considered eligible in this edition, 1,610 projects were selected, 40 of which with host institutions in Portugal, including 13 projects within NOVA University Lisbon.

Even before the publication of the 2025 results, Sio Pan Leong, who presented the project “COMAC – Composing Macaoness: Contemporary Art Music and the Construction of Post-Colonial Macao’s Cultural Identity”, with the supervision of Salwa Castelo-Branco, had already accepted a position funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), thus opting to continue his postdoctoral research in Germany.

Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta, for his part, will begin in October the project “SonErg – Sonic Energies. The impact of energy transitions on Southern Italian traditional woodwind instruments”, supervised by Filippo Bonini Baraldi, with an innovative approach to energy transition based on a fundamental question: how are everyday practices of musical creation and performance in rural communities and landscapes shaped by and shaping energy, socially and culturally speaking?

Gerardo will bring important contributions to INET-md in the field of Energy Humanities, renewing the transdisciplinary intersections between the research groups of Musical Acoustics and Sound Studies and Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies through the thematic line of Power, Politics and Activism.

Photo: ©Marta Apicella CC-BY NC. 

Focusing on traditional wind instruments from southern Italy, still vibrant in rural areas, the SonErg project shows that these instruments are more than just musical tools: they express cultural and socio-ecological changes and are carriers of traditional ecological knowledge impacted by energy and technological infrastructures, materialising local ideas and forms of knowledge about energy.

By examining how traditional instruments are produced, played and transformed through different energy eras, SonErg shows how sonic practices, their materials and techniques record changes in landscapes, resources and power relations.

The next edition of the competition, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026, will run from 9 April to 9 September 2026. INET-md will soon open its usual call for expressions of interest to ensure the proper monitoring of the preparation and development of candidate projects.