Calendar of Events

A Short History of Interdisciplinarity

This lecture is concerned with the history of the idea and the practice of ‘interdisciplinarity’, using this word as an umbrella term that covers trans-, multi- and cross-disciplinarity. The word was first used in English in the 1930s, but a critique of the ever-increasing specialization of disciplines (and still worse, their compartmentalization) goes back to the later 19th century, when new disciplines proliferated in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities and often obtained their autonomy in the form of separate institutes. I shall discuss movements to re-connect different disciplines from the 1920s onwards, noting recurrent strategies such as founding a society, a journal or a centre. In some places, notably in the USA, it was the government, together with private foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, etc) that encouraged these developments more than the universities. Originally concerned with research, the movement widened in the 1960s with the rise of ‘studies’: Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Business Studies, Translation Studies, etc. Where are we now? Has the movement triumphed? Do we see a backlash against it, or what?