Time allotted

Even if you read quickly, there's only so much time. 

One of the reasons I tend to squirm when "interdisciplinarity" comes up--even though my work has been described as interdisciplinary, and even though I've sometimes felt the need to describe myself that way--is that after about twenty years of academic work (oh dear...), I've become more and more skeptical about it as a meaningful way of indicating what I do.  This Twitter thread certainly gives some ideas about how interdisciplinarity can be approached, and yet...well.  Take, for example, the ongoing confusion about what I do for a living.  Quite a few academics over the years have decided that I'm a historian, and historians often relate better to my work than some literary scholars do (that was especially the case with Book Two).  However, when I submitted the article about anti-Catholicism and statistics that eventually wound up in the Journal of British Studies, one of the (surprisingly many) referees shrewdly noted that I must be a "Studies" person, not a historian.  "Finally, someone noticed," I said, wryly.  I'm a literary historian who spends much of her academic study time reading scholarship on the history of religions, mission history, and (yes) literature and religion; this does not mean that I think like a historian or that I've mastered all of the scholarship in those fields outside my own (although I do my best to keep up with what's considered central), let alone that my methods amount to practicing history in the same way.  When I was in graduate school, this distinction was hammered home for me by listening to a historian who was working on a radical poet: his grasp of the poet's biography, his multiple contexts, and the production and circulation of his works was at a level of rich detail that not even the most historicist of us could match (or would be expected to), but he was clearly struggling to interpret how the poems worked (which is the angle all of us immediately took).  My mind still automatically goes to the text's workings (and relations with other texts) first, its historical moment second.    Literary historian who has read a lot of scholarship in other disciplines ! = interdisciplinary scholar, I think.