“I am often asked what is being researched in the humanities field, and although I feel sad when I am asked, it is a question I also used to ask.” This is one of the sins that Blanca Reguant confesses she committed when she was taking her degree in Humanities, just before she discovered her vocation as a researcher. It was in third year, when she had to write up an open-topic academic article for a subject she was doing, when she clicked: “I spent many hours on it and enjoyed it so much that I understood that was what I wanted to do.” Now, almost three years after that day and with a degree and a Master's degree behind her, Reguant is doing her PhD in History, Art and Heritage Conservation.
The path to get there was smooth with no jolts. After a fourth-year work placement in one of the research groups in the Faculty of Humanities, she decided to focus on this area. “When I returned to UIC Barcelona, I was sure that I wanted to do a doctorate in the history of art and that I wanted the Dean of the Faculty, Judith Urbano, to supervise it,” explains Reguant. She is currently working on her thesis on the participation of female artists in exhibitions in Barcelona between 1888 and 1936. In fact, through this task, she believes that she will contribute not only to academic research but also to university teaching and dissemination: “Doctoral candidates want to make a contribution to humanity, bring some new knowledge to the world, illuminate something that was once dark,” she said.
A hateful comparison
Aware that it is a difficult label to remove, Reguant claims that although there are no experiments or laboratories or patents involved, the research carried out in the humanistic field is as valuable as that carried out in the scientific field. “We take new perspectives on phenomena, texts or authors that may not have been studied enough or gone unnoticed,” argued the doctoral candidate, who added that the past “can always help to understand the present.” In that sense, she considers that research is not only relevant but necessary and uses her thesis as an example: “Until recently, there was no talk of female artists in history classes or manuals because they had not been studied, so they did not exist,” she explained, “but over time it has been shown that they did exist, even though historiography had forgotten about them or hidden them.”
She has only completed the first of three years of her doctoral programme, but Blanca Reguant is sure that the flame of passion she feels for what she does is more alive than ever. When she looks back, however, she regrets that there are many people “with a humanistic vocation,” but few with “enough courage to overcome all of the social hurdles” that those who decide to choose this path have to face. “The opportunities opened up by humanities are infinite, you just have to know how far you are able to go,” she concluded.
