ERC surge, reading tough feedback & tomorrow's free job-market webinar

Welcome back. 

Two things this week, and a live invitation for tomorrow. The ERC has just announced its 2026 Starting Grant winners — €705 million to 421 early-career researchers — and buried in the numbers is a story about the market that matters more than the headline. On the craft side, I want to talk about the thing almost no one teaches you: how to actually read and metabolise the feedback you get on your work, whether from a supervisor, a reviewer, or a rejection letter. And at 11 a.m. CEST tomorrow, the free webinar on the European academic job market I've been mentioning goes live — details at the end.

01 · In the field: ERC Starting Grants 2026 — €705m awarded, and a 22 percent surge in applications

The European Research Council announced the results of its 2026 Starting Grant competition on 3 September: €705 million to 421 early-career researchers, working at institutions in 25 EU Member States and associated countries. Germany hosts the largest share (89 grants), followed by the UK (47), France (38), Switzerland (36) and the Netherlands (33). Fifty nationalities are represented among the winners. The funded projects span the sciences, engineering, and — importantly for this newsletter — the social sciences and humanities. 

The headline that matters more, though, is the one about the applicant pool. 4,807 proposals were submitted this round, up 22 per cent from 3,928 the year before. Only 8.8 per cent of proposals could be funded. Applications from researchers currently based in the United States increased (169, up from 116), and 21 US- and Canada-based researchers were selected, representing 5 per cent of winners — more than double the previous year's share. ERC President Maria Leptin called the incoming cohort "creative and ambitious," and Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva framed the Choose Europe initiative as "helping to attract the next generation of scientific talent."

The 2027 Starting Grants call is now open, with a deadline of 14 October 2026.

Why this matters: for SSH scholars planning an ERC application, the picture is more competitive than it was even a year ago. A 22 % surge in submissions means the marginal cost of a middling proposal has gone up — a serious application now needs a clear, defensible research question, a real plan, and time to be shaped before October 14. If you're on the fence about the 2027 round, my honest take is: unless your proposal is already in strong shape or you have a serious block of writing time between now and mid-October, treat the 2028 round as your real deadline and use the coming months to build the argument rather than rushing a submission. And if you are going in this cycle, block the writing time now, and get at least two rounds of colleague feedback in before you submit.

02 · On the craft: How to actually read the feedback you get on your writing

The academic year has just started and my inbox is full of the same thing: clients forwarding me their supervisor's comments, their peer-review reports, their rejection letters. And the pattern is always the same — they've read the feedback once, quickly, in a state of low-grade panic, and now the document is sitting in a folder they can't bring themselves to open.

This is understandable. Feedback on writing you care about is one of the hardest things academic life asks you to do. But I've come to think the actual craft skill isn't "receiving feedback gracefully". The skill is reading feedback slowly enough that you can tell what the reader is actually saying, and separating that from how it lands emotionally. These are two different tasks, and if you try to do them at once, both go badly.

Here's what I ask my clients to do, and what I do myself when I get a hard set of comments:

Read the feedback three times, on three separate days. Not three times in one sitting — three separate days, with a night of sleep in between each one. The first read is the emotional read: you notice how it feels, you let yourself be annoyed or deflated or vindicated. Nothing else. Don't try to think about the manuscript. Just notice your reactions.

On the second read, translate every comment into a question. A comment like "the theoretical framing is underdeveloped" is not a verdict; it's a question the reader is asking, and your job is to figure out what question. Is it "which theorists am I working with and why?" Is it "how does my framework connect to the empirical material?" Is it "what work is this framework doing that another framework wouldn't do?" Most feedback that feels crushing on first read turns out, on second read, to be three or four fairly specific questions you can actually answer.

On the third read, sort the questions into three buckets. The first bucket: comments you agree with — the reader has caught something real, and you'll revise. The second: comments you disagree with but that you now realise the paper has failed to answer clearly enough — the reader has misunderstood, but the misunderstanding is your writing's fault. The third: comments you disagree with and that reflect a different intellectual position the reader is bringing to your work. You do not have to accept everything in bucket three. You do have to acknowledge it in your response letter, and often, addressing it briefly in the manuscript strengthens the piece.

This three-pass method sounds slow. It is. But it replaces the alternative, which is either months of avoidance or a rushed revision made in a bad emotional state. The three days let the manuscript become a manuscript again, and not a mirror of your worth.

One more thing, because it comes up constantly: feedback from a reader who does not understand your field is still real feedback. If a Reviewer 2 in a general journal missed the point of your paper, that is not only Reviewer 2's failure. It is also information about how the paper reads to someone outside the conversation you're in. Usually, revising for that reader makes the piece stronger for the specialists too — see last week's newsletter on writing the first paragraph for a curious colleague from a neighbouring field.

I will be talking more about strategies for coping with peer-feedback during the Postdoc Appreciation Week. You can sign up for the workshop here. 

Try this week:

1. Take one set of feedback that is currently sitting untouched — a supervisor comment, an R&R, a rejection letter.

2. Read it once. Don't take notes. Just notice the emotions.

3. Come back to it in 48 hours and translate each comment into a question. That's it for this week — no revising yet.

03 · Tomorrow at 11 a.m. CEST: the free live webinar on the European academic job market

If you've been meaning to sign up for the webinar I've mentioned the last two weeks — this is the last window. It goes live in a few hours.

5 Strategies for Stronger Job Applications on the Academic Job Market in Europe
Today · Tuesday 8 September · 11 a.m. CEST · 60–90 minutes · live on Zoom · free · replay sent if you can't make it live

The European academic job market is opaque by design. A hiring committee scans a cover letter in under two minutes; if they don't find what they need in those first seconds, the rest goes unread. Nobody tells you what they're looking for, which is why so many strong candidates fail on presentation rather than substance.

In 90 minutes, we'll cover the five strategies I use with the researchers I coach: the reality of the European market (competition levels, the mismatch between PhDs and positions, why strong candidates still miss the shortlist); how to position yourself as a colleague rather than a student, and what "fit" actually means in European hiring; what committees look for in the first two minutes of your CV and cover letter; how research and teaching statements, references, and supporting documents can be made to read as one coherent application; and how to run several applications at once without losing focus. There's a preview of the paid Job Market Course at the end for anyone who wants to go deeper, and live Q&A time to bring your own situation.

This is for PhD students preparing to enter the market in the next one to two cycles, postdocs in active application rounds, ECRs in the humanities and social sciences, international researchers applying to European institutions, and anyone who has applied before without success and wants to understand why.

Your free registration also includes access to the EMERGE Café — the community of 300+ social-science and humanities academics where the live session and replay are hosted.

Save my spot — no credit card, no spam, unsubscribe anytime. If you can't make it live, the replay will be available. 

Warmly,
Melanie Sindelar
Founder, EMERGE Scholars Collective