Special Forum: Victorian Studies and Interdisciplinarity

10 Special Forum: Victorian Studies and Interdisciplinarity • To celebrate the first issue of Victorian Review edited at the University of Victoria, the editorial team invited members of our new international advisory board to consider the significance of interdisciplinarity toVictorian studies, a question that goes to the heart of this journal’s mandate.Anticipating lively and even polemical responses, we posed the following questions:» What has been the impact of interdisciplinarity on the field of Victorian studies?» How is interdisciplinarity defined and practised inVictorian studies?» How is the field ofVictorian studies informed, structured, and/or haunted by nineteenth-century notions of interdisciplinarity?» What new approaches are needed inVictorian studies to create a truly inter-/multi-disciplinary field?» What are the costs, limitations, or disadvantages of interdisciplinarity forVictorian studies?» As it applies toVictorian studies, does the future of interdisciplinarity tend towards cultural studies?» How does interdisciplinarity inform the relationships among teaching, research, and the academy forVictorian studies scholars?» From the point of view ofVictorianists, what are the politics of interdisciplinarity in the academy? This forum brings together the thoughts of leading international scholars on this topic.They sound notes of both optimism and caution. Some see interdisciplinarity as a radical“queering” of our“comfortable and comforting modes of categorization” (Hall 28) and are“grateful” that English departments now accommodate a broad range of interdisciplinary methodologies (thus allowing them to do the work they find most satisfying) (Daly 20). Others, however , caution against the illusion of having“mastered the methods or met the standards of other disciplines” (Armstrong 13) and warn that such boundary crossings can facilitate administrative cuts to already underfunded humanities programs (O’Gorman 45). This forum launches what we hope will be a regular feature of the journal under our editorship: provocative and timely intellectual exchanges among international and Canadian scholars of theVictorian period. The Editor ia l Tea m ...