Dear blog,

Last Wednesday on 20th May we held an AHRC block grant-funded doctoral training day called ‘The Visual and the Verbal’ at Lancaster University: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/english/events/visual-verbal.htm. It was a brilliant day. We had 14 students participating from lots of different disciplines (English Lit, Creative Writing, Art, Art History, History, and Museum Studies) and lots of different universities (Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester Metropolitan, Lincoln, the Courtauld Institute, Keele, Manchester, etc etc). It really reminded me of the LitSciMed events that I ran between 2009 and 2011 (http://litscimed.org.uk/) and it made me remember which bits of my job I really do love and why. One of the best bits of the day for me was the five-minute presentations that the students gave about their projects, which were all so fascinating and exciting. We also spent the afternoon in the Ruskin Library (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/ruskinlib/Pages/welcome.html) and it was a real thrill for the students to be able to handle Ruskin’s drawings and letters and see his notebooks.

We started off the day with a session run by me on interdisciplinarity. I used Joe Moran¹s book with this title (the New Critical Idiom one) which he revised in 2010 and which is still really great and even more up to date now. In this session we spoke about whether institutions (jobs, depts, funding bodies) encourage or discourage this kind of research.

I learned yesterday too, from Martin Willis, Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science (https://www.bsls.ac.uk/) that ‘the British Academy has invited contributions on issues of interdisciplinarity to inform a report they will shortly write. In order to receive evidence of interdisciplinary research they have tasked a Working Group with inviting
and organising submissions.’ You can read more about this here: http://www.britac.ac.uk/news/news.cfm/newsid/1272

After reading Moran’s updated conclusion to his book, I wonder whether there is a bit of a backlash coming now about interdisciplinarity or whether this British Academy report will continue to be positive? For my part, I always maintain that explicitly working with an interdisciplinary approach actually makes me far more aware and reflective
about my own (home) discipline. I think of English as a set of skills or approaches perhaps more than a canon of texts. Applying a literary critical approach to, say, early nineteenth-century scientific writings can reveal the rhetorical devices used to achieve political ends, which might not otherwise be very obvious. There are lots of other ways to work in an interdisciplinary way too though.

I guess, ultimately, I’m with Moran when he writes that interdisciplinarity shouldn¹t result in a big mess of stuff which is neither one thing nor the other but a carefully
defined, honed new way of thinking or working which is truly transformative.

More soon,

Sharon