Webpage of the research project "Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators"
You are invited to attend the student workshop Methodological Challenges in Reviving Peripheral Voices: Archives, Performances, and Literary History, which will take place on Monday, December 8, 2025, at 9:40 a.m. in Lecture Hall 434.
How does archival research transform when minoritarian communities don’t just share or show you their archives but perform them for you and with you instead? Drawing on research with the Rum community in Turkey and its diasporas in Greece and the USA, this workshop examines how marginalized communities transfer their archives through enactment: reading documents aloud, recreating scenes, and sharing objects through embodied storytelling. For communities whose histories don’t align with national paradigms of memory, performance becomes a way to claim agency over their archives’ afterlives.
The Rum community performs its archives—what we will explore as “archival enactment”—to determine not only what gets preserved but how it circulates, who participates in its transference, and what futures it enacts. Through hands-on exercises, participants will experience how this performative approach to archival preservation works, especially when traditional archives are closed, scattered, or lost.
We’ll grapple with practical questions: How do you ethically participate when a community enacts their archives with you? What knowledge emerges through performance that wouldn’t appear in written documents? How can researchers honor communities’ active role in shaping their archives’ afterlives and the conditions of their own mnemonic preservation? By shifting from asking what the archive is to what the archive does, this workshop will offer tools for developing collaborative archival research practices that center community agency in shaping memory politics and recognize performance as archival method, not just archival content.
About the speaker: Christina is a Matija Murko Fellow in Intellectual History at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics at the University of Milan. Her research examines minoritarian and diasporic theatre histories in the Eastern Mediterranean and its global diasporas. Her work has appeared inPerformance Research, Theatre Research International, Archival Science, Interventions, and Mediterranean Studies, among other international journals. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She co-convenes the SWANA Theatre Working Group at ASTR and serves as Focus Group Representative for Theory and Criticism at ATHE.
Monday, 20. 10. 2025 at 9:40 a.m., Lecture Hall 434, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana): “Free Experimental Thought: Nietzsche and the Modernisation of Mathematics”
Mathematics, with its ostensible origins in the lines drawn in the sand by the Ancient Greeks, is still often viewed as a culturally neutral enterprise whose influences and forms of knowledge are irreconcilable with those of literature and art. It is this disciplinary line in the sand that I seek to destabilise with this lecture on the versatile modern mathematician, Felix Hausdorff, and his influences from a philosophical heavyweight who seems to bear little relevance to mathematical thought but whose influence on cultural modernism was perhaps unrivalled: Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1903, Hausdorff gave his inaugural lecture as a professor of mathematics at Leipzig University on the “das Raumproblem” (the problem of space), an event that set him up to become a decisive actor in the modernisation of mathematics in the 1910s and 20s. Immediately prior to this, however, Hausdorff enjoyed a brief period of philosophical and creative engagement under a pseudonym Paul Mongré, releasing two philosophical volumes, a swathe of critical essays and even a successful stage play. In this lecture, I argue that Hausdorff’s ideas as a modern mathematician can be traced back through the Mongré period to a direct engagement with Nietzschean philosophy. Specifically, I argue that Hausdorff’s conceptualisation of mathematics in the modern era as “free experimental thought” is bound to his reception of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Return and the critique of language and ontology in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. By tethering Nietzsche’s explicitly non-mathematical ideas to the field’s modernisation in the early 20th Century, I thus excavate a small, local but nonetheless important moment of cross-disciplinary influence. Ultimately, it is hoped, the enduring perceptions that keep mathematics and the humanities at a distance from one another are put on less solid footing.
Thursday, 23. 10. 2025 at 3:30 p.m., Blue Room (conference room), Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana): “The Poetry of (Anti-)Logical Ideas: Modern Mathematics and the German Avant-Garde”
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the trailblazing Göttingen mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935) became known among her colleagues for a strident belief that mathematicians are in fact artists, not scientists. To what extent, therefore, can modern mathematics, be considered alongside contemporaneous literary and cultural modernisms? In answer to this question, this lecture seeks to better embed modern mathematical thought and methods within a wider modernist collective, considering rather different waves of the German and European Avant-Garde in the process. Firstly, I seek to disrupt the more plausible discussion of the Bauhaus school as “modernist” in a sense that parallels mathematical modernism. Though replete with geometrical and constructive concepts, Bauhaus espouses the very philosophies of space, cognition and objectivity from which mathematics broke away in the early 20th Century: Platonism and Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. In turn, I identify a more fitting counterpart for mathematical modernism in the least likely of places: the disorderly and purportedly illogical Dadaism. For all their apparent differences, I argue that both modern mathematics and Dadaism adhere to a formal procedure — a way of thinking and working — that fundamentally reimagines logic, abstraction and criteria of meaning. In the end, Noether’s brand of mathematics, called “the poetry of logical ideas” by Albert Einstein, finds unexpected operational parity in Dada’s “Antilogik,” spanning sound poetry, readymades and assemblages.
Short Bio
Tom Hedley (he/him) is a visiting research fellow at the University of Ljubljana and currently a FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher based at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he lectures on German-language literature and culture. A graduate of German and mathematics from Trinity College Dublin (2017), I completed an MA in Literature, Art and Culture at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany with the support of a DAAD scholarship (2019). He defended his PhD on German modernism and mathematics at Trinity College Dublin, which was fully funded by the Irish Research Council, in December 2023. Between his PhD and current postdoctoral role, he was a lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University. On top of 20 conference presentations in nine countries to date, he has published his research (in both English and German) in journals such as Germanistik in Ireland (2021), Imaginaires (2021), Open Library of Humanities (2025), Germanistische Mitteilungen (forthcoming 2025) and Modern Language Review (forthcoming 2026).
We are pleased to invite you to read the special issue of the 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐣𝐚𝐥𝐧𝐚 𝐤𝐧𝐣𝐢𝐳̌𝐞𝐯𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐭 journal dedicated to the work of Slavic philologist 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐣𝐚 𝐌𝐮𝐫𝐤𝐨 and his relationship with comparative literature. The guest editor of the issue is Blaž Zabel.
From Blaž Zabel’s Introduction:
“Murko has also frequently been cited as a comparatist. Anton Slodnjak referred to him as the first Slovenian comparative literary historian, Anton Ocvirk highlighted his research on Czech-German literary relations in his 𝑇𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑗𝑎 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑗𝑎𝑙𝑛𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑒 𝑧𝑔𝑜𝑑𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑒, and the American comparatist Albert Bates Lord called him a “true pioneer” in the study of oral literature. Despite the clear significance of Murko’s work for comparative literature both in Slovenia and nternationally, his contributions to the field remain relatively unknown, as does his influence on the discipline’s international development. This publication seeks to fill this gap.”
We are pleased to be able to invite you to read the article What Is Semiperipheral Scholarship? A Case Study of Matija Murko (1861–1952) and His Reception in Oral Theory and Literary Studies, written by the project leader, Dr. Blaž Zabel and published in the latest issue of the journal History of Humanities.
In this article, I explore a specific type of scholar who may be canonized in disciplinary histories as a central figure but whose scholarship is not seriously considered or fully comprehended. The history of such semiperipheral scholars and scholarship raises its own set of research questions, problems, and even necessitates particular research methods. I argue this by examining the life and work of Slavic philologist Matija Murko (1861–1952), whose research remains mostly unknown, despite his recognition as a pioneer of oral theory and his influence on two central scholars, Milman Parry (1902–35) and Albert Bates Lord (1912–91). I demonstrate that various historical contexts influenced the semiperipheral reception of Murko’s scholarship, such as the discipline he was affiliated with, the language of his publications, the institutional context, and his status in the concurrent academic network. In the concluding section, I discuss the relevance of studying semiperipheral scholarship for understanding the history of humanities.
The University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, and the project ‘Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators’ are pleased to announce the first Matija Murko Fellowship in History of Humanities.
The fellowship aims to support an early-career researcher at the doctoral or postdoctoral level for a stay of up to three months at the University of Ljubljana, working on any topic broadly related to the project. This includes research into the history of comparative literature, literary theory, philology, or the humanities in general.
The fellow will be expected to reside in Ljubljana for the duration of the fellowship, contribute to the intellectual life of the department, and deliver two guest lectures. They will also be encouraged to work towards a collaborative publication or collaborate with the project’s research group in other ways. The fellowship is tenable for up to three months at any time between August 2025 and December 2025 and will cover travel costs (up to €700), accommodation in Ljubljana, and a small stipend (the amount of which depends on the length of stay). Please note that we are unfortunately unable to sponsor visas.
The fellowship will be awarded as part of the research project, ‘Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (J6-4620),’ funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (www.comparativeliterature.si). The project explores ways to bring peripheral academic voices into mainstream narratives about the history of comparative literature. We are particularly interested in bridging the gap between close and distant reading, as well as between micro- and macro-history, an approach we believe can help uncover lesser-known narratives in the history of scholarship.
Interested applicants should submit their application by e-mail, including the following:
– A statement of their preferred dates for the fellowship;
– A one-page letter outlining the reasons why they are applying and explaining how their research relates to the project;
The Slovene Comparative Literature Association cordially invites you to the Ocvirk Award ceremony, which recognises the best monograph in the field of comparative literature written in the last two years.
The biennial Ocvrik Award will be awarded on Thursday, 29 May 2025, starting at 6 pm at the Dvorana štirih letnih časov (Four Seasons Hall) on the second floor of 4 Novi trg, Ljubljana.
The jury, consisting of Krištof Jacek Kozak (Chair), Andrejka Žejn and Lucija Mandić, will select the award recipient from the following nominated works:
Kristina Pranjić: Jugoslovanska avantgarda in metropolitanska dada (Založba Sophia, 2024);
Matevž Kos: Vitomil Zupan ali kako biti jaz (LUD Literatura, 2024);
Vid Snoj: Vrhovi v globini II., Pindar (KUD Logos, 2024);
Marko Juvan: Zadnja sezona modernizma in maj ’68: svet, Pariz, Ljubljana (LUD Literatura, 2023).
The nominated texts will be presented briefly at the event, followed by a discussion between the winner and a member of the jury after the award ceremony.
You are cordially invited to attend two lectures by Dr Abhishek Bose, from the University of Calcutta. The first event will take place on Tuesday, 13 May 2025 at 19:00, at the Faculty of Arts in Modra soba (Blue room) on the 5th floor.
The second event will take place on Tuesday, 20 May 2025, at 18:00, at Faculty of Arts in Modra soba (Blue room) on the 5th floor.
𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐭𝐢: 𝐀𝐧 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚
The term Bhakti encompasses a wide semantic range, including notions of devotion, emotion, love, service, and ornamentation. Within the scope of this study, Bhakti is understood as both an emotive-experiential category and a socio-cultural formation within the field of Indian historiography. While the category remains contested, there is a general scholarly consensus that the phenomenon of Bhakti traverses extensive temporal and spatial boundaries – spanning over a millennium and across vast geographical terrains. The Bhakti movement comprises a diverse constellation of saints, ascetics and devotees who emerge from various regions of the Indian subcontinent, representing a plurality of linguistic, religious, social and economic contexts. Fundamentally heterogeneous in nature, Bhakti finds expression through a rich corpus of poetry, songs, narratives, and performative texts composed in multiple regional languages. Despite this diversity, these utterances frequently exhibit resonances in both aesthetic form and thematic content. This presentation seeks to examine select texts in the context of Bhakti transactions, with the aim of delineating an ideational construct that might connect the plurality of Indian literatures and cultures.
Traditional Indian Performances and the Colonial Postscript
This presentation interrogates the dominant historiography of Bangla drama that constructs a binary temporal framework: the ancient glories of the Sanskrit dramatic literature as epitomised by the authors like Kālidāsa and Bhāsa; and then a straight leap to late Eighteenth century when a Russian adventurer/musician Gerasim Lebedev presents the first Bangla proscenium theatre production in an European fashion. In colonial historiography, the moment of Lebedev’s performance is usually depicted as the start of ‘modern’ Bangla theatre, or even ‘modern’ Indian theatre. This leaves a millennium-long lacuna, ignoring the texts and practices that were, and still are, part of a vibrant and rich performative continuum in Bengal and elsewhere.
The introduction of the proscenium stage, realist dramaturgy, and the canon of English/European drama, particularly Shakespeare, catalysed the emergence of the ‘modern’ and hybridised Bangla theatre in the nineteenth century. Whereas, the theatre stage in Bengal evolved into a dynamic cultural site that both mirrored and contested colonial authority; it also meant significant transformations for the indigenous performance traditions; often relegating these as ‘folk’ or ‘pre-modern’ and hence, regressive.
Within this historical rupture, Rabindranath Tagore emerges as a critical voice. In a short essay, he criticises the mimicking of European techniques or ideologies on the colonial stage. In his search for an ‘Indian’ way of performing, Tagore invokes the ‘rasa’ aesthetics, which serves as the basic premise of Sanskrit dramaturgy. Similarly, Tagore also draws attention to the living and popular vernacular performance practices. This paper considers Tagore’s intervention as a call for a politics of location, offering a nuanced perspective on Indian performative cultures that resists the homogenizing impulses of colonial historiography and modernist teleology. Through this lens, this presentation tries to rethink the entangled trajectories of Indian performative genres and what do that entail for the audience.
Dr Abhishek Bose teaches at the Department for Comparative Indian Language and Literature at the University of Calcutta. His work intersects poetry, translation, theatre and critical research. His primary interests engage with the fields of aesthetics, literature, history of religions, performance and orality. He is associated with several research initiatives supported by institutions such as The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, the Vrindavan Research Institute, Bhaktivedanta Research Centre and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. His most recent editorial work, Kabi Tabo Manobhumi, presents a series of interviews with Ramkatha performers from across various regions and languages of India. Dr Bose is currently a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
We are pleased to announce that our colleague Miloš Zelenka, professor of Czech literature at the University of South Bohemia, has published his report on the international conference “The History of Comparative Literature in Central Europe” held in Ljubljana last September. The article, entitled Matija Murko and the History of Comparative Literature Studies in Central Europe, has been published in the journal Slavica litteraria (vol. 27, iss. 1, 2024).
You can read the full article (in Czech) at the link below:
The aim of our conference is to bring new insights and knowledge of a comparative literature in Central Europe which remains largely unexplored and therefore underrepresented in academic debates in the discipline. We acknowledge that Central Europe was historically shaped into a region of its own by various economic, political, and ideological structures. While we intentionally left the geographic and cultural concept of the area undefined, it is unquestionable that its regional identity was shaped both from within and from the outside. From within, the Central European region always negotiated between its ethnically, linguistically, and culturally heterogeneous communities. This has produced various internal centers and relegated other areas to the position of the periphery. From the outside, Central Europe had to define its position in relation to other global players and transnational associations. These political and cultural circumstances played a crucial role in all areas of intellectual production, including academic research. Comparative literature was no exception and the discipline was often tasked with expanding or subverting established discourses. For instance, Central European comparatists had to acknowledge the rich history of multicultural and multilinguistic literary traditions in the area while at the same time establishing themselves in relation to other academic centers such as the French and the American schools of comparative literature.
Despite its relevance for understanding Central European comparative literature, disciplinary self-perceptions and their relation to the internal and external exchange of knowledge have thus far remained unexplored. Over the next three days we thus explore the rich and complex history of comparative literature in Central Europe, focusing on the key scholars, schools, topics, and methods that have shaped the field. We consider which influential figures and approaches have been historically overlooked, and why Central European comparative literature has remained under-represented in broader academic debates on the history of the discipline. Our exploration also extends to the academic connections between Central European comparative literature and literary scholarship in other regions such as Southeast Europe, France, Russia, and America. We also delve into the relationships between central and (semi-)peripheral regions within Central European comparative literature, analyzing the factors that have led to the emergence of asymmetries within Central European academia and the inequalities in intellectual exchanges between different regions. We also explore how Central Europe’s multilinguistic literary traditions have been reflected in the field of comparative literature.
Finally, three sections are devoted to an important forerunner of comparative literature, a Slavic philologist Matija Murko who offers a paradigmatic case study for addressing many of the questions raised above. Murko has built a long and successful academic career and has had an immense influence on the development of literary studies in Central Europe and elsewhere. After finishing his studies in Slavic philology at the University of Vienna, he travelled to Russia, became a professor in Graz and Leipzig, and later moved to Prague where he co-founded and headed the Slavonic Studies Institute at a time when the influential “Prague Linguistic Circle” was flourishing there. Both in his academic life and in his research, he has been moving between the academic centres and semi-peripheries of Central Europe, breaking academic barriers (for instance, with his comparative Slavic literary studies) and influencing younger scholars (such as Frank Wollman, Milman Parry or Roman Jakobson). His work was appreciated both inside and far beyond Central Europe, so much so that his research on South Slavic oral literature is still considered referential today. Murko’s scholarship thus offers an excellent opportunity to explore topics, questions, methods, international collaborations, and the politics of knowledge prevalent in the history of Central European comparative literature.
Blaž Zabel, colloquium lead
Programme:
Thursday, 5 September
Cankarjev dom, Alma Karlin Hall
9.00: Registration
9.30: Opening speeches
10.00: First panel: Tone Smolej (chair)
Antoni Martí Monterde: Budapest, capitale de la littérature comparée. Les autres géographies du comparatisme européen: Janos Hankiss
Norbert Bachleitner: Prolegomena for the (short) History of Comparative Literature in Austria
Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek: The Discipline of Comparative Literature in Hungarian Scholarship
11.30 Coffee break
12.00: Second panel: Blaž Gselman (chair)
Kaitlyn Sorenson: ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe,’ Forty Years On
Vladimir Biti: Un/worlding Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Post-Multinational Writer
Suman Gupta: Small Philologies and Literary Machine Translation
13.30: Lunch
15.00: Third panel: Blaž Zabel (chair)
Róbert Gáfrik: History and Perspectives of Comparative Literary Studies in Slovakia
PawełMarcinkiewicz: Comparative Literary Studies in Poland: A Historical and Methodological Overview
Zoltán Varga, Péter Hajdu: Reconnected into the World: the Early Years of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association in the AILC/ICLA
16.30 Coffee break
17.00: Fourth panel: Kaitlyn Sorenson (chair)
Daniel Pietrek: Comparative Literary Studies at Work: Horst Bienek and his American Identity
Blaž Zabel: The Birth of Literary Localization: Johann Gottfried Herder as a Comparatist
20.00: Conference dinner
Friday, 6 September
Cankarjev dom, Alma Karlin Hall/Center Rog, University Room
Cankarjev dom, Alma Karlin Hall
10.00: Murko panel I: Alen Albin Širca (chair)
Miloš Zelenka: Matija Murko in strukturalna estetika
Alenka Jensterle Doležal: Premislek o pozitivističnih literarnih zgodovinarjih: Matija Murko in Jan Máchal
Tone Smolej: Matija Murko in nefrancoski začetki slovenske primerjalne književnosti v 19. stoletju
11.30 Coffee break
12.00: Murko panel II: Tone Smolej (chair)
Varja Balžalorsky Antić: Od primerjalnega jezikoslovja do primerjalne književnosti: Matija Murko in Antoine Meillet v luči raziskav ustnega pesništva
Irena Samide: Matija Murko kot germanist
Alen Albin Širca: Matija Murko in hrvaška renesančna literatura
Center Rog, University Room
13.30: Lunch
15.00: Murko panel III: Blaž Zabel (chair)
Sylva Fischerová: Matija Murko’s Research on the South Slavic Epic Tradition and Czechoslovakian Slavistics
Jasmina Talam: Voices from the Past: Musical Tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the Research of Matija Murko
Blaž Gselman: The Correspondents of Matija Murko: Outlining a Central European Topos
16.30: Coffee break
17.00: Fifth panel: Alexandre Burin (chair)
Jernej Habjan: History of World Literature in Central Europe
Max Behmer: German Contributions to 1930s Comparative Literature in the Context of the Journal ‘Helicon’
Saturday, 7 September
Center Rog, University Room
10.00: Sixth panel: Blaž Zabel (chair)
Andrei Terian: Comparatism Beyond Comparative Literature: Lessons from Southeastern Europe
Ştefan Baghiu: The Tragedy of Non-Central Europe: Interimperiality and World Literature in the European Southeast
Snejana Ung: Comparative Literature in Romania: Talking about a Periphery at the Periphery
11.30: Coffee break
12.00: Seventh panel: Blaž Gselman (chair)
Alexandre Burin: Beyond Structure: Barthes via Kristeva
Milena Mileva Blažić: Comparative Children’s Literature
