About the project

The main aim of my project is to investigate the history of disciplinary histories, focusing primarily on the histories of philology, literary studies, and comparative literature. I study how disciplinary histories themselves have changed over time, how they have been envisioned and narrated by scholars, and how cultural, national, and other social contexts have influenced these narratives. My research examines disciplinary histories in the German, French, British, Italian, East European, Southeast European, and American traditions from the 18th century onward. At first glance, this meta-historical topic may seem highly specialized or even peculiar. Nevertheless, I think it is relevant for understanding the role of the humanities in both past and contemporary societies. First, because it offers a deeper understanding of disciplinary identities, along with their embedded self-representations, motivations, goals, possible futures, values, ideologies, traumas, and nostalgias. Second, because it provides a privileged insight into how different local contexts shape their own transnational or global historical narratives. In other words, by approaching disciplinary histories from a historical perspective, one can observe how universal ideas and values about certain academic disciplines are refracted through specific local contexts. Unlike direct studies of the history of academic disciplines, a history of disciplinary histories thus allows us to uncover the disciplinary identities embedded within these disciplines and to explain how local contexts have directly influenced the construction of various universal and global images of knowledge. This is particularly significant for understanding the history of the humanities because it shifts the research perspective: rather than merely adding lesser-known national and historical scholarly traditions to the broader historical narrative, it reveals how specific socio-historical contexts produce, reproduce, and subvert established disciplinary identities in order to create their own localized versions of global knowledge.

About the researcher

Blaž is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He works on the history of scholarship and is especially interested in the historical development of Homeric studies, philology, and comparative literature. He is currently preparing an edited volume on the history of comparative literature in Central Europe, and leads two research projects. The first project, Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (funded by the Slovenian Research Agency), explores the global history of comparative literature, with a particular focus on the philologist Matija Murko. The second, History of Humanities in Slovenia: Internationalisation of Literary Studies, Philology, and Comparative Literature (funded by the University of Ljubljana), brings together a large group of scholars to study the international collaborations of Slovenian literary scholars throughout history.