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NewsvineOld barriers are breaking and new connections are forming, both in the greater world and in the University. Interdisciplinary studies and approaches to academia reflect and help education adapt to this changing climate. Helen Brooks, as acting professor of English and associate director of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities program, has intimate knowledge of the contemporary role of interdisciplinary studies, both personally and professionally.
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Before discovering this interdisciplinary approach to academia, Brooks was an ardent fan of English literature, especially of John Donne’s poetry. She earned a joint Ph.D. in English and Humanities from Stanford in 1980. Questions about how the Early Modern Era’s culture and philosophies influenced Donne’s work presented themselves to Brooks.
Donne’s work was steeped in “a wide range of ideological changes and concerns,” Brooks said. “These concerns derive in large part from profound historical pressures during that era that broke through established boundaries and aesthetic laws of literary, philosophical and visual forms.”
These realizations suggested to Brooks the necessity of understanding not just what Donne wrote, but also of understanding when, where and how he wrote it. She dove into researching the events surrounding Donne’s poetry and into the particularities of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century era in which he wrote. According to Brooks, this historical approach to a work often “grants that text an immediacy and historicity” it would not otherwise have had.
“I personally find my work in literature and other fields endlessly enriched by my interdisciplinary orientation,” she explained. “In my experience, texts gain an historical presence at times mindful of what Northrup Frye describes as ‘the radical of presentation.’”
The value of interdisciplinary studies is not limited to the humanities, however. Brooks pointed to the Environment and Energy Building and its innovative organization as an example. In most research institutes, the researchers and faculty are grouped along departmental lines; in the new Environment and Energy Building, however, they will be grouped by their area of research focus. Similarly, the Medical School is now offering a course on narratives and narrative structure to help future physicians better understand their patients’ stories.
But Brooks does not want to stop there; she said she would like “more dialogue between the humanities and the sciences. I think there are rich opportunities for exchange.”
“This is not at all to say that disciplines do not take interdisciplinary approaches to their fields of study; certainly many do and increasingly so,” she said. “But interdisciplinary programs such as ours attempt to take a more formalized and systematic approach to interdisciplinary study within the context of intellectual and cultural history. Students come to see that the texts they are studying are contiguous with the world in which these texts were produced and therefore are inherently dependent upon interdisciplinary modes of analysis.”
The growing presence of interdisciplinary studies does not mean that we should do away with the disciplines, however. Brooks pointed out that “interdisciplinary study depends upon the disciplines and education about different disciplinary perspectives.”
This interdisciplinary approach has far-ranging and serious application to much of the modern world, according to Brooks. She discussed the “growing diversity and cross-cultural issues” in today’s world and how an interdisciplinary outlook “prepares us to immerse ourselves in that world.”