Klara Müller

I work as a researcher within the project Humaniora under omställning until the end of 2026. The project maps the humanities research landscape in Sweden, aiming to find better ways to articulate and leverage the humanities' potential. My focus within the project is to study the emergence of so-called new or integrative humanities, and their interaction with the development of research policy and research funding in Sweden. With these new or integrative humanities, I refer to humanities that have been integrated with other subjects in new types of environments, often interdisciplinary and oriented toward large societal problems that cannot be addressed by a single discipline. Common terms for specific fields of the new humanities include medical humanities, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. On a larger scale, it is also about better understanding how humanities research is being reshaped in line with changing social conditions. The project is funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2024–2027).

I am trained as a historian of ideas/intellectual historian, and I also work in the sociology of science and research policy. These fields combine my broad interest in knowledge and its prerequisites – how knowledge is created, how it circulates and is mediated, what conditions different forms of knowledge are given through, for example, political decisions, and what knowledge does, in practice. I am particularly interested in humanities' knowledge and its preconditions, where much remains to be explored. Humanities knowledge has long been understudied in both research policy and sociology of science, compared to other fields and areas of knowledge. It is therefore time to better understand what the humanities are and what they do.

My doctoral studies (2021–2025) at The Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology were also devoted to studying the humanities. I was a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary project Making Universities Matter and defended my dissertation Quality and the Humanities: Negotiating Research Quality in Swedish Humanities, 1980s-2020s , on November 14th, 2025.

The dissertation focuses on how humanities research has been valued and positioned through changes in how the concept of quality has been utilized in research policy and academic practice.

More specifically, I studied quality cultures within Swedish humanities research and their change over time. My approach was to study the sites for attaining and legitimizing research quality, which changed and multiplied over this period. I, for example, studied how Swedish doctoral education became increasingly formalized in terms of regulations and ideas of how it was supposed to be quality controlled, and how this affected the so-called "higher seminar" as a space for academic quality control within the humanities. I have also written about the introduction of formalized peer-review practices within Swedish humanities journals and the introduction of national disciplinary evaluations.

My approach was to examine the mutual development of “quality” and “humanities” in Swedish research and research policy from the 1980s to the 2020s. It meant that I was using quality as a starting point for studying the history of the humanities, and the humanities to study changing perceptions of quality.

In addition to my work on the humanities, I have a broad interest in the history of research policy and knowledge politics, research funding, conceptual history, history of computing, and medical humanities.