Comparing Comparing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Comparative Methods and their Histories

Ben Hutchinson (Kent): "Comparison and its Discontents"

6 p.m. c.t., Seminarraum 13, Rabinstr. 8, 53111 Bonn

Lecture as part of the workshop "Comparing Comparing". 

Ben Hutchinson is an essayist, literary critic, and professor of European literature. The author of seven books, including Lateness and European Literature (2016), Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2018), The Midlife Mind (2020), and On Purpose (2023), he is a contributing editor at the Times Literary Supplement and a Fellow of the Academy of Europe, as well as a former Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and Phillip Leverhulme Prize winner. He is currently writing a book provisionally entitled Grammars of Comparison.

As both a method and fundamental process of concept formation, comparison is central to all kinds of inquiry: it is through comparison that categories emerge, distinctions take shape, and the boundaries of scholarly objects are drawn. While forms of comparison have long shaped the pursuit of knowledge, the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the rise of comparison as the “preeminent method for finding commonalities across an extraordinary range of aesthetic, social, and scientific fields of research, from philology to anatomy, from geology to sociology.” (Griffiths 2017, 474) This period witnessed both the formalisation of comparison within specific fields and the development of shared comparative frameworks across disciplines. A fundamental feature of this formalisation was the geographical expansion of the scope of inquiry, either in the search for universal truths or to situate spatial discrepancies within linear models of historical progress. At the same time, distinct disciplinary needs and epistemic traditions shaped how comparison was conceptualised and applied.

More recently, the limits of comparative approaches have been a topic of concern. Comparison is entangled with practices of inclusion and exclusion, raising questions about whose knowledge is legitimised, what is rendered comparable, and how boundaries between disciplines, traditions, and histories are drawn. Understanding the historical contexts in which comparative methods emerged, along with their theoretical underpinnings, allows for a more critical reflection on the methodological choices scholars make today. By bringing together scholars from diverse fields, we aim to foster a dialogue on the ways in which these historical perspectives on comparison can inform contemporary methodological debates and practices across disciplines.

*Hybrid format

09:45 Coffee and hello

10:15 Welcome

10:30 Hanna Zehschnetzler (Cologne): Beyond Comparing: For a Relational Frame of Mind

11:00 Sonia McCall-Labelle (Bonn): Comparative Methods and the Search for
‘folk intonational truth’ in Early 20th Century Russia

11:30 Ole W. Fischer (Stuttgart): Comparing and Contrasting Architecture – On
the Emergence of Stylistic Critique During the 19th Century

12:00 Lunch break

13:30 Martina Palladino (Ghent): The Comparative Method or Comparative
Methods? Some Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Indo-Iranian Philology

14:00 Floris Solleveld (Amsterdam): High-Prestige and Low-Prestige Languages in
Nineteenth-Century Comparative Philology

14:30 Alessandro Bianchi (Newcastle): International Forums, Transnational
Troubles: Navigating National Boundaries in the Long Nineteenth-Century
History of Psychiatry

15:00 Coffee break 

15:30 Antonin Dubois (Metz): Practicing Historical Comparison with the Help of
Social Sciences: Historiographical Accounts and Methodological Reflections

16:00 Simon Werner (Florence): ‘A veritable social laboratory:’ Comparative
Politics, Decolonization, and the Cold War Imagination

18:30 Conference dinner

**Closed format (only participants)

10:00– 13:30 Discussion and closing remarks