Meggie Macdonald

After reading a blog post by a close friend, I find myself thinking intensely about what was said in a way that I normally don’t when it comes to blog posts.  They’re usually good to read, but not really something I think about for days and days on end.  However, this post, about the restrictive nature of interdisciplinary study of any subject is something that, I think, very much needed to be said in no uncertain terms.

It can be found at the URL:  http://vaultingvellum.blogspot.com/2009/01/rant-on-disciplinary-boundaries.html

I was alway partial to my first-year undergraduate courses in Classics and History simply because they were interdisciplinary.  The fact that we had to learn about everything in context and include reference points from primary sources, secondary sources, different languages, archaeological sites, literature, religion, politics and so on was vastly more appealing than studying each of those topics on their own.  The style of academia where these topics are treated as though they must be separated into incubators to survive is not what I want to end up teaching. 

Many people have asked me what I would like to teach at university, and my response is always first-year classes, without hesitation.  Everyone is surprised that I don’t want to specialize in something loftier such as graduate courses, but I don’t feel such work is lofty at all.  Graduate students are rarely impressed with anything but the sound of their own voices, and their ability to network vast amounts of information into a cohesive paper or presentation.  Undergraduate students are still fascinated by the subject and want to learn everything there is to know about it.  I want to feed that kind of enthusiasm.

Having said that, I believe that the author of this post is very right to state that academics who study at the interdisciplinary level find it much harder to establish themselves in an academic post such as teaching because they must decide what department they work in and stick to it.  Not all universities are like this.  I truly believe, as a result of the use of a more thematic approach to study, that the move away from the 19th century structure is happening.  But I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

This is perhaps why ‘amateur history’ is so much more appealing to some of us.  These writers have not been shaped by the decisions of previous scholarship and instead learn everything there is to know about a subject, formulate their own ideas, and get them published.  I remember a fellow student during my graduate studies saying:  “If I’m ever able to write history, that’s the kind of history I want to write.” 

My thoughts exactly.