About the centre
Critical Humanities: Studies in History, Literature and Art.
The Research Center for the Humanities brings together scholars from a wide range of arts and humanities disciplines to pursue the shared study of a region that has traditionally functioned as a dividing line between several historically distinct yet geographically overlapping entities, namely: East Central Europe and Southeast Europe, the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia, Trieste and the Trieste region, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the Ottoman Empire.
The Center’s research areas include literary studies, digital humanities, gender studies, migration, minority and border studies, and media art history.
Literary studies
Research in literary studies ranges from reception-oriented literary history and theory to comparative literature and literary imagology. It also extends to the field of digital humanities and the areas of gender studies, media studies, memory studies, and trauma studies. One focus is on the comparative study of minority and cross-border literatures and literatures in contact, as well as on the development of didactics of cross-border literature.
Gender studies
Within the broad field of gender studies, our research focuses on women writers, their reception in various cultural spaces, and gender representations in Slovenian and world literature. We also study figures associated with the women’s movement in the Habsburg Monarchy. Furthermore, we explore social networks and the history of emotions, as revealed in Slovenian correspondences from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We include approaches from literary studies, digital humanities, and cultural history in our research.
Digital humanities
Digital humanities approaches seek to build bridges between humanities approaches and computer science methodologies, which differ in a number of aspects. At the Research Center for the Humanities, we conduct theoretical and experimental research on information visualization, distant reading, and electronic critical editions. We participate in several projects tied to databases in the domains of literature and culture.
Migration, minorities and border studies
Our research deals with the cultural heritage and cultural memory of diaspora and migrant communities, and with the expressions of their “non-exclusive” multiple identities in linguistic and cultural forms. We also research patterns of multilingualism in relation to ethnic minorities and borderlands, with a special focus on Central and Southeast Europe. Finally, we research the semiotic landscapes of border regions in a wide-ranging comparative perspective, focusing on issues such as resistance, hybridity, and Otherness.
Media Art History
Media art history seeks to integrate into the traditional art historical discipline the discourse of media and mediality from other disciplines, drawing on film studies, literary studies, and media studies. Foregrounding the technical basis of cultural forms, media art history investigates the distinct but imbricated histories of media such as film, photography, and augmented reality alongside mediums such as painting, drawing, theater, dance, and the book. Particular emphasis is placed on cinema and computers as the media that dominated the cultural and artistic imaginaries of the 20th and 21st centuries.