Introduction: towards a cross-disciplinary history of the global in the humanities and the social sciences

This special issue began to take shape in the seminar ‘Global perspectives in the humanities and social sciences’, which the Global Literary Studies Research Group (GlobaLS) organized in Barcelona in 2017. We thank the Department of Arts and Humanities at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and the MapModern project (Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad), for their financial support. We also wish to thank the keynote speakers (Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Jernej Habjan, Katja Naumann, and Peter Wagner) and seminar participants for their lively and productive discussions, which helped us reflect on the history of the global through different disciplinary perspectives. The interdisciplinary analysis of historical and contemporary global issues with increasingly productive flows of theories, concepts, methods, and practices is a principal goal in global studies. However, within the humanities and the social sciences, the idea of the ‘global’ is often restrained by disciplinary boundaries, with scant dialogue and transference between them. The present special issue addresses this fundamental gap by historicizing the notion of the ‘global’ in an interdisciplinary dialogue, with approaches from history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, art history, and media and communication studies.1 Our objective is to gain greater insights on the global approach from several disciplines and to let their borrowings and contributions emerge. The issue responds to a double demand: on the one hand, it undertakes the task of historicizing global perspectives for several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, providing a thorough intervention in the state of the art; on the other hand, it juxtaposes six disciplines to encourage fruitful cross-pollination and to address problems and challenges within a global dimension. The issue has four specific goals: first, to illuminate shared or divergent genealogies and chronologies, showing which theories, methodologies, and approaches to the global have been more productive and can further new paths of cross-disciplinary inquiry; second, to unearth unforeseen relations between disciplines, helping to better acknowledge their borrowings and connections; third, to show contextual and institutional disciplinary changes at a transnational scale, as well as the ideological agreements and discrepancies that often accompany these; and, fourth, to provide a pool of concepts and practices that will