Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community<\/em>, a history of the experimental college that operated in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains (1933-1957)\u00a0that doubles as a self-reflexive examination of the craft of historiography. Interwoven in the narrative are Duberman\u2019s musings on teaching (at Princeton) and his worries about the kind of story he\u2019s telling\u2014as well as his coming out, which serves as a way of addressing the stakes of the college\u2019s puritanical streak when it came to sexual expression. Having already won the Bancroft Prize (regarded as the top prize in the field of American history) in 1961, Duberman left Princeton in 1971 to take up a post at the City University of New York, where he became a major figure in the gay rights movement of the decade.<\/p>\nIII.<\/p>\n
I read Duberman\u2019s journal entry not long before our own first session of HUM 583: Interdisciplinarity and Antidisciplinarity, co-taught with CNW. The entry appears on pages 268-269 (of 578 pages), so it really was a matter of serendipity that reading it aligned with preparing for the course. Here\u2019s what resonated with me when I returned to the passage after the first day: \u201cit\u2019s the combined form I\u2019m searching for\u2014not the straight informational nor straight confrontational.\u201d CNW and I reconceived this fall\u2019s seminar around that mix of information and confrontation, with the latter simply meaning our effort to identify students\u2019 personal stakes in the material. To do that, we zoomed in on the course\u2019s title, which has been on the books since the seminar was conceived as the curricular capstone for the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Recognizing, too, that the course provides a forum for all<\/em> graduate students to discuss how interdisciplinarity relates (or doesn\u2019t) to their work, we decided to proceed with a fresh sense of our charge: figure out what we collectively mean by interdisciplinarity and antidisciplinarity by, first, establishing a baseline understanding of disciplinarity (and the disciplines).<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like Duberman, I don\u2019t know how that mix of information (Klein and Frodeman, Perloff, Edwards) and confrontation (academic divisions at Princeton activity) came off for the class. The good, as far as I can tell: key points about the rise of the disciplines that took us six weeks to get to last year we more or less introduced in this session. On this point, the activity CNW and I executed helped make palpable, alive, at-hand the abstract formulation of knowledge production in the modern American research university. And when we did get to IHUM\u2019s slightly more open way of conceiving humanities research at Princeton, I was humbled by KK\u2019s question, \u201cWhy not open IHUM to all<\/em> units (i.e., graduate students) on campus\u2014not just those \u2018approved\u2019 by our mandate?\u201d This struck at the core of just how difficult it is to do interdisciplinary work that actually challenges the way knowledge is produced and assessed in higher education. CNW offered a response to KK\u2019s question, \u201cThe sciences may not feel that they need us to do their work,\u201d is both perceptive and revealing of the shape of the university today. Even though the sciences\u2019 concerns feel far-flung from our seminar, it\u2019s precisely by acknowledging that distance upfront that we can begin to do work from our own (op)positionality.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What didn\u2019t go as well as I might have wanted? I know I should\u2019ve spent more time with my object lesson. The Turkle reading was a good entry point into this component of the seminar, but we didn\u2019t get to discuss it at great length. Our readings and group activity took up much of the classroom time we had available to us\u2014and I don\u2019t regret that. (I did a callback to Turkle during the activity, explaining how her stature as a world-renowned historian of science and technology [at MIT, no less] still doesn\u2019t qualify her to contribute to Division III or Division IV professional matters.) But even as time ran out on me, I couldn\u2019t help but notice that\u2014without any explicit planning\u2014CNW and I had brought in examples of technological obsolescence. CNW\u2019s cart of office supplies and my burned mixtape CD (and note how \u201ctape\u201d is retained in that lingo) surely had something to say in themselves and to each other. And, deep down, they might reflect our own hesitation about teaching not just HUM 583 but at all in our contemporary situation of AI at once exploiting the university\u2019s (human, physical, immaterial) resources and selling it back to the university as learning tools. We didn\u2019t get this far, but such dialogue is, I think, the intent behind the seminar\u2019s object lessons.<\/p>\n
IV.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it interesting to consider that over 55 years ago HIS 308: American Radicalism had attempted to do a version of what HUM 583: Interdisciplinarity and Antidisciplinarity seeks to do in 2026? Duberman was a rebel in his time for teaching an ungraded undergraduate course whose intellectual subject overlapped with with its pedagogical ethos. What happened between that time and now, such that Duberman\u2019s experiment seems at once familiar in theory and inconceivable in practice? What are we, in HUM 583, trying to learn, or relearn, about experiments in education at Princeton?<\/p>\n
September 21<\/strong><\/p>\nHR response:<\/p>\n
If our first discussion introduced us to departmental divisions at Princeton and histories of interdisciplinarity in several fields, our second probed what it looks like to navigate disciplines, moving from MH\u2019s intellectual biography, to HH\u2019s question (why compare?<\/em>), to Florian Fuchs\u2019s account of his training in Kulturwissenschaften. <\/em><\/p>\nBefore coming to Princeton, I had conceptualized interdisciplinary as synonymous with interdepartmental, which is Austin\u2019s definition. He explains that interdisciplinarity is not intrinsic to a text, but \u201cthe byproduct of a\u2026system of intellectual categorization whose form is dictated by locally specific institutional forces\u201d (272). Interdisciplinarity, on this account, is structured institutionally in \u201carea studies\u201d programs and the \u201cdouble major.\u201d Yet the issue, which some readings mention, is how to navigate these institutions when departmental specialization morphs into insularity (I had an undergrad professor who described the university with a quasi-parable: \u201conce upon a time people built towers, and they threw stones at the other towers\u2026 and these are called departments\u201d).<\/p>\n
But our readings and class dialogue have led me to think: can interdisciplinarity instead be catalyzed by objects? made up through relational practice? Can it exist without institutions?<\/p>\n
Material<\/em> and method<\/em> keep circling for me as I mull over these questions. On material, several readings suggest some objects of study contain internal logics that unavoidably catalyze interdisciplinary inquiry. I\u2019m thinking of the \u201chybrid genres\u201d that led art historians to look to the social sciences and music scholars to challenge their discipline\u2019s boundaries (Klein & Frodeman, 147-8). Likewise, Fuchs ends his chapter claiming that short narrative forms \u201cdisregard\u201d the separations of academic disciplines, instead enacting \u201ctransgressions of genre, media, and epistemological borders\u201d (248). Moreover, how does it feel<\/em> to encounter these objects of inquiry that intrinsically lead to interdisciplinarity\u2014are they ever objects like Turkle\u2019s evocative objects, both fragments of our emotional lives and<\/em> catalysts of thought? Fuchs spoke about the joy his approach to material gave him, and MH said she would have fun in her inquiries.<\/p>\nOn method, the readings explicitly name collaboration as interdisciplinary phenomenon. Robinson (a literary critic) writes how she collaborated on a book about feminist scholarship with a philosopher and a historian (278); Henkel and Torgovnick mention that collaboration between people from different disciplines generates new insights (279, 282). Fuchs named another method: the problem-oriented. His training in Germany encouraged him to follow problems and continue his inquiry past disciplinary \u201cwalls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our discussion also made me think about conversation as a discursive mode of interdisciplinarity. MH described the interdisciplinary exchanges she had with researchers during her time in special collections libraries. I recognize this too in the Writing Center where I work, where each Fellow dialogues with student writers from different disciplines. Such a conversation-based model is meant to generate thinking without presupposing disciplinary knowledge of the writer\u2019s field.<\/p>\n
So, if one can arrive at interdisciplinarity via material, method, or mode of discourse, does interdisciplinarity always manifest as institutional structure (a grant, a double major, a program) or can it itself be a practice (a conversation, a collaboration)?<\/p>\n
I sketched these ideas before drafting my response to help me think, sharing in case a visual is useful to anyone else too! <\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/461\/2026\/09\/HR_pic-1024x951.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
JG response:<\/p>\n
We began with an object: a roll of expired camera film housed in a small paper box. Photographs shot on expired film invite unpredictable effects upon their development: discoloration, blur, streaking. Chance draws attention to singularity. We think of photography as a capturing of its own mechanism of repetition: reproduction. Yet no two \u201cexpired\u201d photographs, even when shot under the same lighting, taken of the same subject, ever exhibit identical, or even quite comparable, effects.<\/p>\n
What is comparison? Comparo<\/em>, \u201cto couple together (in pairs, or in the same relation, or in judgment),\u201d but also: \u201cto prepare (with zeal),\u201d \u201cto arrange,\u201d \u201cto procure (what one does not yet possess or what is not yet in existence).\u201d The word \u201cpseudomorphism\u201d came up in the context of interdisciplinary comparison. In sliding a critical framework between (disciplinary) contexts, do we not disrespect the singular crystallization of a given object? Does not a discipline, in the application of its own thematizing framework, likewise discipline <\/em>singularity out of the picture?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nWhat discipline proudly (or reluctantly, depending with whom you speak) advertises its comparative lens? This is Comparative Literature. In outsourcing language-specific literary study to home language departments, within which Comp Lit faculty sometimes hold joint appointments and sometimes do not, its system veils the \u2018who\u2019 of labor, scrambling important institutional statistics.<\/p>\n
The same non-localizing of the \u2018who\u2019 of labor \u2013 a non-localizing which slyly accompanies the institutional discourse of \u201cinterdisciplinarity\u201d \u2013 can be used as bureaucratic cover for labor adjunctification.<\/p>\n
Whose labor, and for whom? That is, to pass over into the reception of such labor: Who act as audience to interdisciplinary (\u201ccomparative\u201d) effort? Can the scholar seamlessly cross over into the role of critic, of public intellectual? Modernists in Art History departments are at ease, perhaps even conscientiously compelled, to write \u201cpublicly\u201d \u2013 to \u201copinionize\u201d \u2013 for journals such as Artforum, whereas those studying the older traditions sometimes criticize this slippage. The question of the form of a \u201cpublicity\u201d with a basis in scholarly rigor, or the question of what that rigor entitles, or justifies, splits a discipline along the faultlines of its own self-periodization.<\/p>\n
Contrasting definitions (or deconstructions) of interdisciplinarity in the 1996 MLA survey reveal the politics immanent to its conceptual murkiness. Henkel points to the absence of co-authorship within and across literature departments, as compared to the sciences. Murray argues that importation of findings and methods from another discipline into one\u2019s own can be successful only so far as such importation accounts for the historical production of disciplinary stability. The scientific discourse of \u201cevidence\u201d forgets, from the outset, that the sense of its discourse is presupposed by literary, historical and religious phenomena. It forgets that it is a discourse.<\/p>\n
Our visitor, Florian Fuchs, considers himself a thinker of genre: the meaning he gives the term is precise, yet the pool of \u201cevidence,\u201d or material, which he syncretizes, as well as his manner of syncretization, is capacious, unlimited: a \u201cchaotic criss-crossing of the meaningful-meaningless mixture\u201d (to quote Ernst Bloch). His is a civic gesture, akin to the sort he tracks in his recent book, which demonstrates the ways in which contemporaneous forms of storytelling undo logics of representation that appear, at first glance, to govern their aesthetics and, as a consequence, to deny genuine aesthetic comment. Speaking of the filmmaker Steyerl, Fuchs writes: \u201cWhat she desires to be \u2018documentary\u2019 is thus a form of genre, rather than a mode of representation.\u201d Steyerl makes a gross hyperbole of a contemporary aesthetic framework, drawing attention instead to the cradle of utterance, to genre, inventing this \u2018genre\u2019 anew in the form of a genre pronouncing upon<\/em> the often-meaningless (or disingenuous) complex of contemporary aesthetic production<\/em> and therefore inhabiting \u2013 embodying <\/em>\u2013 its critique. Florian gives us here a definition of \u201cembodied interdiscipline\u201d applicable both to artworks and to the orientation of scholarly criticism.<\/p>\nSeptember 28<\/strong><\/p>\nEC Response:<\/p>\n
Our discussion in the first half of class was grounded by the terms set out in C.P. Snow\u2019s essential \u201ctwo cultures\u201d text \u2013 an essay whose afterlives, re-readings, and even rewritings perhaps exceed even its initial impact. Broadly, I was struck by the way that, even if we might have contested Snow\u2019s conclusions about the different identities of scientific versus literary culture (and we did \u2013 especially his implicit preference for the sciences!) we all seemed to accept his premise that disciplines do, in fact, constitute cultures. In other words, perhaps what is most essential to take from this text is its formulation of academia as just as social and situated as it is professional (and, therein, universalizing in its claims of knowledge). This analytic of academic life as its own culture or set of cultures might carry over to Hare\u2019s reconceptualization of the culture of the university as place of community building rather than knowledge acquisition. It might also apply to Veblen\u2019s conception of the status of useless knowledge in the formation of an elite. That is, even if those authors may have differed in their understanding of precisely what <\/em>cultures universities and disciplines promote, they help us see the way academic thought relies on convention and custom in a manner not indistinct from other forms of living.<\/p>\nIt was fitting, then, that our guest in the second half was an anthropologist, Elizabeth Davis, who is attuned to precisely these methods of cultural analysis. Davis began by speaking about the essay we read by French ethnologist Jeanne Favret-Saada about witchcraft in France. Davis narrated both the disciplinary significance of this text and its role in her own intellectual formation \u2013 a dualism of personal and professional that we might say is consistent with our understanding of academia as culturally conditioned. (In other words, the texts that are essential to us might be so because they have a particular purchase in the academy at our moment of intellectual formation \u2013 either because of their conformity to or departure from disciplinary norms; it\u2019s hard to separate out the historical and personal in this kind of question). Favret-Saada helped us discuss how anthropologists might move beyond a transparent understanding of speech as a medium of communication and read it as a not-always-true manifestation of other desires, beliefs, etc. I was interested in this idea that anthropological fieldwork, with its reliance on the interview, might offer a theory of communication (not only culture) \u2013 and that this theory might have broad implications beyond that particular discipline.<\/p>\n
To this point: as an art historian, I find that close-looking is the most effective tool I can take from my discipline and apply beyond its borders. Davis, whose book The Time of the Cannibals <\/em>includes an extended photo essay comprised of archival material from Cypriot news outlets, also helped us think about the role of images outside of the history of art. Much like the non-transparency of language in ethnographic speech, the archival image is, of course, highly coded. To this end, we asked: to what extent does the plasticity of images (via AI, etc.) affect our ability to read them as truthful generally? Davis\u2019s work on conspiracy helped her see that it will not reward anyone\u2019s time to stabilize the veracity of images in relation to audiences. Rather, we need to develop new analytic tools for looking at images in an environment where their veracity is in question. Here, I feel the tools of my discipline are made more, not less, essential by the instability of images in life broadly.<\/p>\nMS Response:<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s objects: a bottle of Advil (liquid gel capsules), a mock postcard featuring a hotline graphic, and a type specimen book. While these objects expanded on our established interest in the obsolete in some ways, they also invited new conversation about the evolution of technology (the hotline, in this case) over time and the strange appeal of quotidian objects. I was also left wondering about the nature of drafts and templates. Elements such as the constraint and repetition of typeface, the molded uniformity of industrially manufactured plastic, and the \u201cblank\u201d page of the working draft raise questions about process, repetition, and discipline.<\/p>\n
Our discussion of this week\u2019s texts (Hare, Veblen, Snow) pointed to several conflicts, stress points, or fault lines that characterized these pieces. For instance, Hare\u2019s proposal for a Black studies department explores tensions between integration and segregation, knowledge accumulation and community building within the university. Further, Veblen critiques leisure-class standards of learning, pointing to a conflict between bourgeois ideals and those of \u201ceveryday life\u201d. Finally, we spent the most time discussing Snow\u2019s elaboration of the rift between the \u201ctwo cultures\u201d (the scientific and literary). Returning to the theme of evolution over time, I was very interested in whether and how these texts translate to the contemporary moment. For instance, as we discussed, it seemed that most of us are not socializing with scientists, which may indicate the continued relevance of the two-culture divide. However, in terms of discontinuity, I found Snow\u2019s characterization of scientific optimism less convincing today, as scientists increasingly serve as unheeded prophets of doom. With their evidence-based warnings about climate issues and public health routinely dismissed, scientists seem less certain that \u201csomething can be done,\u201d and increasingly convinced of the \u201ctragic\u201d nature of the social condition.<\/p>\n
For me, the concept of the \u201cfault line\u201d was particularly helpful insofar as it reinforces that these three articles each take place at critical moments of change. It seems that just as these geographic features are a product of shifting earth and rising pressure, our authors respond to \u201ctangible changes\u201d (Veblen), \u201ca state of crisis\u201d (Hare), and the impending split of \u201cthe intellectual life of the whole of Western society\u201d (Snow). Here, I wonder about the function of disciplines as a response to various kinds of crises: knowledge, political, economic, etc. Moreover, as our authors each engaged in comparative projects in some way, is there something about a crisis that makes us want to compare? Finally, is the university ever not in crisis?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Each Friday by noon, two members of the class will send 300-500 word responses to the most recent seminar to CNW and KN, who will post these here. \u00a0As our final project develops, specific assignments toward that work will appear below as well. September 14 CNW response: Introductions revealed a wide breadth of disciplines represented … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Discussion Thread”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3806,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3806"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":65,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f26\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}