About the centre

Critical Humanities: Studies in History, Literature and Art.

The Research Center for the Humanities brings together scholars from a range of arts and humanities disciplines in the shared study of a region that has traditionally served as a dividing line between several historically distinct but 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 research areas across which the Center has representation 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. Research in literary studies also extends to the field of digital humanities and the areas of gender studies, media studdies, memory and trauma studies. One focus is on the comparative study of minority and cross-border literatures and literatures in contacts, as well as on the development of didactics of cross-border literature.

Gender studies

In a wide 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 the representatives of the women’s movement in the Habsburg monarchy. Furthermore, we explore social networks and the history of emotions, as revealed in the Slovenian correspondences from the late 19th and early 20th century. We include approaches of literary science, digital humanities, and cultural history in our research.

Digital humanities

Digital humanities approaches are an attempt at building bridges between humanities approaches and computer science methodology that differ in a number of aspects. At the Research Centre for 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 ways. 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 within the traditional art historical discipline the discourse of media and mediality from other disciplines, borrowing 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, augmented reality with mediums such as painting, drawing, theater, dance, and the book. Particular emphasis is placed on cinema and computers as the media dominating the 20th and the 21st century cultural and artistic imaginaries.