How to determine whether work belongs in an interdisciplinary program?

[chloeolivia]

Hi everyone!

 

I found this forum incredibly useful and supportive (despite my lurker status) while applying to MA programs last year, but want to join the conversation now that I’m beginning the more arduous (and infinitely more confusing) process of applying to doctoral programs. I hope I can be as generous as I found others last year, while also getting some much-needed advice about my own problem: I’m trying to determine whether I belong in an interdisciplinary and/or cultural studies program or could work successfully in certain English departments. I don’t think I have enough perspective or knowledge of the discipline(s) to gauge whether this is necessary. 

 

A bit about me: I’m about to enter my second year of a Joint MA program in English and WGS, where I’m very happy (I applied to six MA programs last year and would be glad to talk to anyone who wants advice about the process/funding/my decision to do a Master’s before a PhD). My undergraduate degree is also in English and WGS. Broadly, I’m interested in British modernism, queer theory, and childhood studies. Some of my more specific interests are queer temporality, the coming of age novel/bildungsroman, disability/critical age studies, the history of sexuality, and psychoanalysis. My strongest work focuses (as will my writing sample, most likely) on queer temporality in the novels of Virginia Woolf, but I’ve also written on topics as diverse as queer counterpublics on Instagram, the postcolonial bildungsroman, and Peter Pan.

 

My disciplinary quandary: I feel a bit uncomfortable with (but could probably adapt to) the idea of committing to a historical period and am definitely more interested in questions of identity than those that are conventionally literary. This is reductive, but one way I can explain my approach is that while I like to “apply” queer theory to literature, the theory is not just a useful but secondary apparatus for me – it comes first and isn’t a means to an end. Indeed, I’m definitely comfortable working with non-literary texts, and am not certain that I would be happy working exclusively with literature, which might rule out some programs. In addition to some interdisciplinary programs, I’ve included some (comparatively) more traditional ones that seem like places I could work on my more discipline-appropriate interests, such as gender and modernism. I hope to narrow this long list down to about ten programs after I have a clearer idea of where my work belongs:

 

UPenn

Duke Literature

UT Austin

NYU

CUNY

Michigan: Joint PhD in English and Women’s Studies

Rutgers

Pittsburgh: Critical and Cultural Studies

UC Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Riverside, and LA

Vanderbilt

Washington University in St. Louis

Northwestern

USC

UC Santa Cruz: History of Consciousness

Stanford: Modern Thought and Literature

(Possibly) Emory WGS

 

I'm aware of the fact that finding programs that "fit" will be easier once I define my interests and goals with more precision. Nevertheless, I'd really appreciate feedback on some questions about my provisional list:

1)    I’ve heard conflicting opinions about interdisciplinary programs both here and from professors. Job-suicide or preparation for imminent disciplinary dissolution? What about doctoral programs in WGS?

2)    Does it sound like I belong in a cultural studies program? Are there ones I should know about?

3)    Can anyone who is enrolled in or has experience with any of these programs offer advice as to whether they fit with the sort of work I do? I’ve done a great deal of research, but still can’t get a sense of what some programs are really like. Please speak up if you think a program wouldn't work for me! It would also be a major relief to know if any of these programs sound like a good fit :-)

4)    Finally, I’d love to connect with people who have similar interests or have grappled with the problem of interdisciplinarity. 

 

List aside, I’d be grateful for any kind of feedback on this post! I know its length merits an apology -- but I want to give a full sense of the situation to the wonderful people who take the time to consider my questions. Thank you!

[ProfLorax]

My strongest work focuses (as will my writing sample, most likely) on queer temporality in the novels of Virginia Woolf, but I’ve also written on topics as diverse as queer counterpublics on Instagram, the postcolonial bildungsroman, and Peter Pan.

I can't help you with the questions you listed (all good questions), but I wanted to suggest that perhaps you look into some rhetoric programs. There's Rhetoric at Berkeley, which is very interdisciplinary, but also rhet/comp programs. While some scholars in rhet/comp do, many of us don't focus on a specific timeframe nor a specific genre. I utilize feminist, disability, and queer methodologies to study embodied rhetorics in disability activism, so I've written papers on speeches, on zines, on hashtag activism, and on bodies in protest. Of course, even if you lean toward the rhetoric side of rhet/comp, you still must have an enthusiasm for composition--teaching it, studying it, etc. You may want to look at the work some queer theory scholars are doing: KJ Rawson, Jonathan Alexander, Adela Licona, and Pamela VanHaitsma. I really like the edited collection put together by Charles E. Morris, Archival Queer.

 

You may also want to ask yourself: what do you want to teach? Do you want to teach Women's Studies courses? Literature courses? Writing courses? That's always a good place to start.

[unræd]

You may also want to ask yourself: what do you want to teach? Do you want to teach Women's Studies courses? Literature courses? Writing courses? That's always a good place to start.

 

Don't know why any of us bother to chime in when ProfLorax invariably asks just the right questions, but I've got some experience that is oblique to some of your concerns, if not wholly parallel.

 

In re interdisciplinarity, I hear rumblings from friends in the field that the job market in WGS is in even worse shape than it is for lit programs. I have no direct experience with that, though, but I can speak to my experience as someone who weighed whether to apply to programs that were intra- or interdisciplinary last year, although in a (potentially) very different field--medieval studies. There (and again, this might not be the case for the interdisciplinary fields you're considering), program choice and the training you receive are vital. There are only two real Medieval Studies programs on the continent (I'm kind of ignoring Yale, since they only admit one student per year) that regularly place people; anywhere else, it's a bit, as you say, career suicide. And the reason those programs place the people they do is because for all their interdisciplinarity, they strongly emphasize the need for a disciplinary identity when going on the job market. There are vanishingly few interdisciplinary programs (in any field) in the US, and certainly not enough to provide jobs for the smallest fraction of their own graduates; most place their students within the confines of traditional disciplinary boundaries, which means it'll behoove you to be able to walk and talk like an English (or whatever) PhD. A cautionary story of someone with an interdisciplinary PhD who was at one point being interviewed for a TT job in an English department, told to me by someone who was on the hiring committee to illustrate the importance of disciplinary prep: when asked to name what sort of literary texts he might teach in the bog-standard "Intro to the Major" class, he blanked, and could hardly name a single novel. That's an extreme example, sure--I certainly still applied to an interdisciplinary program, and almost attended one--but a useful one.

 

Your statement that for you theory is not a means to an end but an object worthy of study in and of itself makes me say that you should really, really, really consider UC Berkeley, or at least keep it on the list. I can't speak to the program in Rhetoric, but that same exact sentiment--studying the work of critical thinkers not as a practical toolbox but as a body of thought with its own history, contours, and importance--was repeatedly and explicitly stressed by current graduate students as a strength of the English program over some others, and while I'm just starting out there this fall, it's certainly been borne out by some of the things I've already seen of the department.

 

If you have any further questions about either my experience navigating interdisciplinarity or UC Berkeley English, feel free to shoot me a line!

Edited August 11, 2015 by unræd

[echo449]

Small note about Pittsburgh--the English PhD is named that more because of the department's past than where it is currently. If you look at the department's webpage for recently completed PhDs, you'll see that the literature students are completing pretty normal English projects (not that there is anything wrong with that; this is only to say that the title of the PhD is misleading).

[__________________________]

Great advise above, Berkeley should definitely be on your list.  You should also definitely look at the University of Chicago -- while it's not the only English program like this, it is certainly a good example of a place where one is encouraged to have certain widely-applicable theoretical concerns first and foremost and to let those settle within historical/generic boundaries second (and even then, one's imagination is encouraged to wander).  Cornell, I think, would be worth looking at as well.

 

I dunno, to me, it sounds to me like you'd do fine with an English program.  At least where I am, there are plenty of people who primarily work with theory first and foremost.  This will vary with departments, of course, but I think it's fine to have a primarily theoretical set of interests, as long as you know what your "big questions" are and how you would use literary texts (alongside other sorts of texts, I guess) to go about "answering" those questions.

 

If I were you I'd look at whatever programs seem interesting and not be afraid to apply to a mixture of different sorts of programs (e.g., one or two WGST, one or two cultural, 3 or 4 English or something like that) and see what sticks.  Fwiw, at first I was going to apply to half comp lit, half medieval studies and ended up applying to four MS, four English, and one comp lit (or something like that) and wound up at an English program that I'm quite excited to be starting next month.  I think there's plenty of room for the sort of work that you seem to be describing within English but that doesn't mean there might not be more interdisciplinary programs out there for you.  Two cents.

Edited August 13, 2015 by mollifiedmolloy