History, agency, competitive funding

Over the past fifty years, historians have become increasingly dependent on national and international external funders who award grants via hyper-competitive funding schemes. In this piece, I discuss the impact of this competitive governance regime on both the historical profession and the historical discipline. By examining the history of European Research Council (ERC) funding for historical research from 2007 to the present, I show that excellence-oriented grant competitions have reshaped relationships of power between historians and, in the case of the ERC, promoted an outspokenly «scientised» vision of historical research. On a more abstract level, these shifts reveal that competitive funding relates to a problematic standardisation of historical research and consequent loss of internal pluralism within the historical discipline. I reflect on the positions historians can adopt in relation to this system of competitive funding and call for alternative systems of research funding allocation.