Seminar in Theory and Methods

The second crucial component for Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry is a seminar run collaboratively by the postdoctoral fellows in the spring semester. That collaboration will be enriched by the multiple conversations among postdoctoral fellows and by their colloquy with mentors and other faculty involved in the postdoctoral program. The aim of the Theory and Methods seminar is to raise questions and address problems that face all of us involved in interdisciplinary research and teaching. These questions will rise out of particular research problems and teaching experiences, but our aim is to generalize these issues so that the postdoctoral fellows and our own graduate students might join together in addressing such problems as the evolution of academic disciplines or the nature of historical methods. Core readings in theory and methods provide some of the common ground for each seminar; but discussion of current and on-going projects will allow the interrogation of such widely shared concerns as the nature of evidence, the problems of language in a post-deconstructive world, and the role of theory in guiding empirical research. Our own experience in the Theory and Methods seminars of the Literature & History Program, the American Culture Studies Program, the Women and Gender Studies Program, and in the Mellon Dissertation Seminars, which have balanced theoretical discussion with case study, is valuable in guiding the initial formation of the Theory and Methods Seminar for the Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Inevitably this seminar will take on a life of its own informed by the research interests and teaching experience of the individual members of the seminar.

Running such a seminar is a challenging and important experience for the postdoctoral fellows and invaluable for our own graduate students who join in this effort. There has been much discussion of the role of theory in contemporary literary and cultural studies programs both on this campus and in other universities, and there have been individual efforts to join in that discussion — in German, in Literature & History, and in Women and Gender Studies — but there has been no sustained effort at Washington University to have our graduate students address the issues of theory and method as a group and across the humanities and the social sciences. The Theory and Methods Seminar will provide such an occasion both for the postdoctoral fellows and for our own graduate students and faculty.

Click on the course titles on the left to see sample syllabi developed by Mellon postdoctoral fellows.