The project A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877–1944) (GloRC) intervenes in ongoing international debates on the emergence of comparative literature in East-Central European comparatism. Rather than aligning with the utopian Weltliteratur paradigm that underpins recent scholarship, GloRC is grounded in World-Systems analysis and inter-imperial frameworks. From this perspective, it reconstructs an alternative genealogy of the early comparative practices developed in the territories of present-day Romania.
The project’s main objective is to recover, systematize, and critically reassess Romanian comparatist contributions that have remained marginal within the discipline due to restrictive national or Eurocentric frameworks. It explores the ideological and cultural conditions that shaped the multilingual configuration of early Romanian comparatism, with particular attention to inter-peripheral exchanges with other traditions, to intellectual projects that reworked the legacies of empires, and to the tensions and convergences between ethnocentric nation-building projects and decolonial impulses.
A Global History of Romanian Comparatism 