Evaluating the humanities — my postdoc research

Up to now, the history of peer review in the humanities has been almost entirely overlooked. Since peer reviewing is a crucial gatekeeping activity in academic contexts, historians’ lack of attention for this practice is — to say the least — somewhat strange. But what makes the lack of historical attention for peer review even stranger is that the entire system and idea of peer review underwent significant changes in the last seventy years. Since the 1950s, assessment at grant agencies, within editorial boards, and in hiring committees evolved from being more informal and flexible to becoming blind, bureaucratic, and highly formalized. But why? And to what effects?

To some extent, the story of how this happened has been written by historians of science, as well as sociologists of knowledge. The first bureaucratic systems of peer review arose in the 1950s in private and national grant agencies in the USA, and after the term ‘peer review’ was coined in the US medical sciences in the 1970s, blind review practices spread to other disciplines and geographical contexts. This story, however, is not well adapted to the humanities, as definitions of quality, discourses and practices of evaluation, and scholarly norms and values are different in humanities contexts. Both for historians of peer review and for historians of the humanities, the current lack of research on peer review in the humanities is therefore problematic. Evaluation infrastructure after all determines how we think of what is being evaluated, and peer review may thus have co-defined what the very “humanities” are.

In this, project I therefore address the history of various forms of scholar-to-scholar evaluation in three European funding institutions and one humanities journal.