Interdisciplinarity, German Studies, and the Humanities

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity, German Studies, and the Humanities Janet Ward (bio) The purpose of the German Studies Association shall be to promote the study of history, political science, language and literature, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, musicology, cultural studies, art and architectural history, and all other learned pursuits relating to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other German-speaking regions. —GSA mission statement What is the lure of interdisciplinarity in the humanities? If our work consistently leads us to the borders, to the edges of disciplines, we tend to arrive there by intellectual and emotional instinct rather than by any conscious plan. Parsing this impulse, historian and literary scholar Harvey Graff has suggested in his recent study Undisciplining Knowledge (2015) that interdisciplinarity is, in its most basic form, “part of the ongoing reshaping of the disciplines”—in other words, interdisciplinary work, whether humanistic or not, is a creatively natural, not an unnatural, process.1 That which happens on the interstices of a field regularly determines the next knowledge breakthrough—and eventually influences the emergence of new disciplines, or at the very least new articulations and self-understandings of existing ones. Looking back, we can see how the work done along these interfaces and border zones between disciplines has indeed pushed German studies into new formations—with parallel evolutions occurring in other areas of the humanities. The German Studies Association’s mission statement (above) may have started life simply to attract scholars from cognate disciplines to the annual conference, but it has ended up pointing to the energy contained in the research boundaries and flows between those fields. The GSA’s conference program increasingly showcases topics that escape the bonds of any single-disciplinary categorization, especially through the freedom of the various multiyear networks’ panel clusters and, more recently, the annual seminar topics. Following in the steps of David Sabean, the inaugural interdisciplinary committee chair whose idea it was in 2008 to create networks for the GSA, Marc Silberman and I, during our term as cochairs, helped to introduce many of the new [End Page 517] networks, believing firmly in their creative, democratizing potential for research, and their dynamic, bottom-up, communicative effect upon our organization. Network coordinators are approved by both the GSA president and executive director, serve for renewable terms, and, crucially, guide each network’s annual call for papers and panel series proposals for the annual conference. These coordinators are selected by the GSA committee on networks, the reconstituted new version of the interdisciplinary committee, and were first recognized by 2007–2008 GSA president Celia Applegate for their qualities as innovators; they are invited to lead the networks precisely as a collaborative team over a multiyear period. In practice, interdisciplinarity in the networks’ panel clusters is sustained by the coordinators with several basic goals in mind, as my former interdisciplinary committee cochair Marc Silberman and I wrote in a “best practices” document for our successors, Jennifer Evans and Pamela Potter: “bridging temporal epochs (i.e., avoiding a presentist approach); bringing in more disciplines (especially beyond history and literature); and constituting panels in which scholars from different disciplines talk to each other (and attract an audience that crosses disciplinary boundaries).” Partly as a result of the growth of the networks—and the vital support for the networks demonstrated by the GSA’s presidents and executive council/board members, as well as the interdisciplinary initiatives shown by multiple GSA members at every recent conference—the GSA’s membership has become much more diverse, with conference attendees now emerging from formerly less well represented fields of cultural analysis. GSA networks like Family and Kinship, Law and Legal Cultures, Memory Studies, Music and Sound Cultures, Visual Culture, and War and Violence have demonstrated cross-disciplinary work with scholars in, e.g., anthropology, archives and museums, art and architectural history, geography, legal studies, and musicology. Moreover, the dynamic, collaborative potential fostered by the multiyear networks has now been developed further by the annual call for seminar topic proposals: seminars permit a multiday set of conference meetings of selected scholars with predistributed papers. Indeed, there is a useful amount of multidirectional creative flow between the GSA conference program’s two interdisciplinary structures of networks and seminars. The Emotion...