Histories of Scholarly Evaluation in the Sciences and Humanities, 1700-2000

Call for Abstracts
Deadline for abstracts (500 words): 31 January, 2026.

Organising Committee:

● Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (Ghent University)

● Sjang ten Hagen (Utrecht University)

● Joris Vandendriessche (KU Leuven)

● Els Minne (KU Leuven)

Evaluation, i.e. assessing how an entity attains a certain time of worth, and valuation, i.e.

giving worth or value, permeate all domains of the social. As notoriously “complex, slippery,

and often elusive sociological objects”, valuation and evaluative processes are also intrinsic

parts of scholarly work (Lamont 2012, 203). Manuscript feedback, editorial reviewing,

proposal ranking and departmental assessment—scholars today as in the past regularly

judge the merit of their colleagues writing (Fyfe et al. 2020; 2022; Vanderstraeten 2021),

ideas for new research (Serrano Velarde 2018; Gläser and Serrano-Velarde 2018; Verbergt

2024), work environments (Hamann 2016; 2018), careers, and, even, character (Tsay et al.

2003; Wils and Huistra 2020; Ten Hagen 2022). Scholarly evaluation thereby has a history;

one that touches on both the social, intellectual, cultural and epistemological aspects of

science.

With this call for abstracts, we want to invite historians and other interested scholars to

reflect collectively on the broad and multi-faceted history of scholarly evaluation. Scholarly

evaluation, we argue, is and has not solely revolved around quality control or gatekeeping.

Instead, evaluative moments can also be approached as instances of knowledge production,

circulation, transfer, or constitution. Historically, scholarly evaluation has also been related to

education and teaching students how to do proper scholarship (Seifert forthcoming) or

guarding the autonomy of scientists over their work (Baldwin 2018). In line with the work of

Laura Stark on ‘declarative bodies’, we moreover see (scholarly) evaluation as a performative

act: evaluation processes can produce new ideas, structure our thinking about (valuable)

scholarship, and (re)establish collectives (Stark 2012; 2019).

During a live workshop in Leuven (Sept 2026), we aim to use the varied perspective of

evaluation to probe the – shared or distinct – histories of knowledge production and career

development across the sciences and the humanities. Inspired by developments within the

burgeoning field of history of knowledge, we think histories of evaluative cultures have the

potential to enhance our understanding of questions related to access, legitimacy, and the

development of scholarly reputations in a more holistic way. By this we mean that the

evaluative practices, regimes and/or repertoires that have shaped scholarly careers were

only partly determined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, practices such as “peer review”

were shared across fields, moved between them, and were adapted in the process to fit

specific scholarly needs. Moreover, they were shaped and influenced by more widely shared

socio-political and cultural contexts and values. It is these histories of similarities and

contrasts, travels and adaptations, the workshop aims to uncover.

Possible themes and questions

Our approach to the theme of scholarly evaluation, as well as our periodization, is therefore

consciously broad. We are interested in how evaluative infrastructures, methods, repertoires,

and more, have shaped the long history of the sciences and the humanities since 1700 and

up to today. To structure our discussions, we can delineate three larger sets of questions:

(1) Cultures, contexts and circulation of scholarly evaluation: In which contexts can we find

scholarly evaluation, and how have specific national or disciplinary ‘evaluative cultures’ been

established and/or reproduced?

● How have evaluative practices in the humanities historically differed from those in

the natural and social sciences? And to what extent have “scientific” models of (peer)

evaluation been appropriated and negotiated within the humanities, or perhaps vice

versa?

● To what extent did evaluative practices travel between the sciences and humanities?

Did ideals and practices of scholarly evaluation spread across geographical

boundaries, for example between Euro-American contexts and non-Western

contexts?

● Where did evaluation(s) take place? We invite contributions studying evaluative

cultures in educational contexts, seminars, journals, conferences, scientific societies,

universities, scholarships, etc.

● How can we write a history of evaluative cultures that brings to light similarities and

relations between specific disciplines or across fields? Should such histories focus

on shared (national, transnational) actors and/or institutions, ideals, or other shared

contexts? Can historians trace similarities in reviewers’ struggles with, or in the

continued presence of, biases related to gender, politics, race and ethnicity?

(2) Practices and ideals of scholarly evaluation: Which evaluative practices, repertoires, and

evaluative technologies were part of scholarship at a given time, and how did these change?

● Which practices and ideas of merit and value were driving scholarly evaluation in a

specific discipline? To what extent did new evaluative practices shape genres of

writing, methodological approaches, or ideas about ‘good’ scholars and scholarship

(epistemic virtues, vices)?

● How have evaluative processes historically been organized (internal vs. external

reviewing, informal vs. formal reviewing, varieties of technologies of evaluation)?

Who were allowed to act as reviewers, and who were excluded from this role? To

what extent were such inclusions and exclusions informed by historical conceptions

surrounding gender, race, and ethnicity?

(3) Functions of scholarly evaluation: Why did scholars engage in evaluation, at a particular

moment in time or during a specific period, and how did that differ per evaluative practice?

● What has been the relative function of various types of scholarly evaluation? How, for

example, has the relation between pre-publication and post-publication peer review

shifted historically?

● How have evaluative practices in educational settings (e.g. the nineteenth-century

seminar, contemporary ‘peer learning’) historically related to evaluative practices in

research settings? To what extent has ‘peer review’ been pioneered in educational

contexts?

● How did the different functions of scholarly evaluation (learning, gatekeeping,

selecting etc.) relate and/or collide with each other in different settings?

Interdisciplinary excursions to the sociology of (e)valuation, i.e. the sociological study of

value and evaluating (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Lamont 2012), psychology of judgment,

gender studies, and other fields are warmly encouraged, as are comparative and global

approaches to the theme.

Timing

We propose the following timing that works towards an edited volume that we intend to

submit to Studies in the History of Knowledge (formerly at Amsterdam University Press,

now at Taylor & Francis):

● 31 January, 2026: Deadline for abstracts (500 words). Please email abstracts to

mariegabrielle.verbergt@ugent.be, s.l.tenhagen@uu.nl,

joris.vandendriessche@kuleuven.be and els.minne@kuleuven.be.

● 28 February, 2026: Selection and feedback on abstracts.

● 1 September, 2026: Submission of drafts (approximately 4000-6000) words

● 27-29 September, 2026: Network workshop in Leuven, Belgium; travel and hotel

will be covered.

● 1 February, 2027: Submission of final drafts (8000 words, references included) for publication at Amsterdam University Press

This workshop is organised as part of the Integrating the Histories of Science and the

Humanities, 1500-1900 Scientific Research Network sponsored by the Research

Foundation – Flanders (FWO). Bringing together nine international partners, the network

explores what happens when we view the relation between the natural and the human

sciences through the lens of their intertwined histories. For more information, see:

https://hshh.prd.ugent.be/en. The workshop is co-funded by the ERC-project Global

Academies (KU Leuven). For more information, see: Global Academies — Cultural History

since 1750.

Photo: View over canal in Gent by Mathias Ripp