The Humanities - Bigger and Bolder

In 2012 then Modern Language Association (MLA) president Russell Berman called for a “new era” in graduate education in the humanities. Among other things, he proposed five-year PhD degrees in the humanities as well as curricular changes that included more “professionalization opportunities” to prepare students for the reality of multiple possible career tracks. He concluded by citing past MLA president Sidonie Smith, who herself had called for institutions to start supporting and legitimizing “alternatives” to the dissertation monograph to reflect the changing nature of scholarly communication and research in the digital information age. While I agree with both of these ideas, I would like to entertain a series of other proposals to reimagine graduate studies in the humanities generally and in German specifically.

Building “Big Humanities”

In the medical sciences, engineering, and the applied social sciences, it is not uncommon to think in terms of “grand challenges” or “big problems”: a cure for a disease, energy independence, global health, clean water, and so forth. These are not only big problems but ones that require years and years of effort to solve; they require many people from various disciplines to work collaboratively, including generations of scholars, often in labs, and folks from public policy, the non-profit and for-profit worlds, government, philanthropy, and so forth. The work takes years, even decades, to carry out. The research proceeds incrementally and may, in fact, fail. Nonetheless, it’s cumulative, with students coming in, working in labs for a short period of time, receiving their degrees focused on elemental aspects of the research process, and moving on.

In the humanities, we approach things exactly the opposite way: ever smaller, ever more specialized problems, addressed by single individuals almost always working in isolation, with the end product being a dissertation monograph. We peer into the microscope, focus, and train our graduate students to do the same. In fact, everything in the humanities is set up to support scholarship in isolation: individual achievement is valorized, single-authored texts are the norm, and even office space is organized by separating scholars from one another. While these practices may come from a tradition of fostering thoughtful contemplation and individualized writing, it means that collaborative research is the exception in the humanities, and graduate students are hardly ever brought into the research process as partners and contributors except to produce their own individual scholarship.

What if, instead, we asked ourselves the following question: what is the biggest challenge – call it perhaps “the twenty-year question”—in your discipline or field? What would it mean to address this challenge with generations of graduate students, who would work with faculty as well as outside collaborators – potentially across multiple disciplines and institutions – to come up with ways to understand, address, contextualize, and respond to this challenge? The idea is to think as big as possible.

Let me get more concrete: how might we author and compose a comprehensive history of migration in, say, Europe or just Germany? It would need to treat the topic historically, geographically, socially, culturally, and economically; it would focus on issues of race, the history of the nation state, histories of exile and expulsion, technologies of mobility, assimilation, identity, public policy, gender, and representations of difference and otherness; it would be multilingual, transnational, and multimedia – and it would take decades to do well. It would have primary material, translations, annotations, commentary, interactive media, historical analyses, close readings, distant readings, data sets and their interpretations, and maps; it would be a forum for debate and the development of public policy, a resource for courses, a collaborative site for reviewing scholarly research of all types (from article-length arguments to book-length narratives on specific topics). It would be an integrated and collaborative research product with contributions by many graduate students and faculty from various departments, disciplines, and even institutions – in essence, it would be a twenty-year research project.

Big projects like this already exist in certain humanistic fields such as archaeology, where long-term fieldwork and broad-based collaboration are common. In the digital humanities, foundational projects like the Perseus Digital Library are more than...