This project studies the overlooked history of peer review in the humanities between 1950 and today. In this period, peer review, i.e., the institutionalized evaluations of research and researchers by others working in the same field, underwent significant changes. Assessment at grant agencies, within editorial boards, and in hiring committees evolved from being more informal and flexible to becoming blind, bureaucratic, and highly formalized. So far, the story of how this happened has been written from the perspective of historians of science. The first bureaucratic systems of peer review arose in the 1950s in private and national grant agencies in the USA, and after the term “peer review” was coined in the US medical sciences in the 1970s, blind review practices spread to other disciplines and geographical contexts. This story, however, is not well adapted to the humanities, as definitions of quality, discourses and practices of evaluation, and scholarly norms and values are different in humanities contexts. Both for historians of peer review and for historians of the humanities, this hiatus is therefore problematic. Evaluation infrastructure after all also determines how we think of what is being evaluated, and peer review may thus have co-defined what the very “humanities” are. This project addresses these gaps by looking at the history of various forms of scholar-to-scholar evaluation in three European funding institutions and one humanities journal.