Discipline and Publish

Theoretical discussions of interdisciplinarity are all very well, I keep thinking, but it's the practical aspects that concern me.  For example: time.  One cannot simply waltz into another discipline and cheerily appropriate whatever scholarship comes conveniently to hand (especially if said scholarship does a fine job of confirming all your own preconceptions).  Are there invisible scholarly kerfuffles at play? Equally invisible political/theological/methodological/etc. biases at work? What about the visible ones? (In religion and literature studies, these can require some tap-dancing.  Or finessing, if one has two left feet.)  And then the questions one has to learn to ask--it's not interdisciplinary if the frameworks all emerge from one's home discipline.  

Interdisciplinarity is a fluid state, in any event.  Right now, I'm working on an article about an extremely important Victorian religious periodical that, in practice, nobody wants to read (that's the story of my intellectual life, really).  It looks like it's going to be a straight-up intellectual history piece, with no literary critics anywhere in the sources (well, unless Mary Poovey gets in there); the relevant context lies in ecclesiastical history and the history of the social sciences.  But I also have an article coming out next year that is straight close reading of fiction, and another circulating that does the same thing.  The readers of this article might think I'm a historian; the readers of the other two might think I'm a literary critic.  And anyone who reads my most recent article, which is in film studies, might be confused by the rest of my CV.