About

The project titled A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877-1944) (GloRC) intervenes in the current international debates on the birth of the discipline by uncovering an overlooked tradition of comparatism, anchored in the East-Central European context. Framed by World-Systems analysis, decolonial an inter-imperial concepts, rather than by the Weltliteratur utopianism infused in recent World Literature Studies, GloRC traces a new genealogy of the comparative methods employed in the late 19th-early 20th century territories of todayʼs Romania. The main aim of the project is to establish an archive of Romanian comparatist contributions which have not been previously acknowledged due to narrow disciplinary, national and Eurocentric constraints. Our projects explores the historical, existential, and political conditions that shaped the multilingual, polycentric and interdisciplinary dimension of early Romanian comparatism by pursuing the following lines of inquiry: (a) inter-peripheral intersections between Romanian comparatism and the comparatist tradition of other Eastern, Northern and Southern European regions, (b)  the intellectual projects that capitalized on the legacy of the Eurasian empires, and (c) the dynamic between various ethnocentric nation-building projects and their vested decolonial investments.