KEY INSIGHT 2: EXPAND BEYOND ONE DISCIPLINE
My Introduction to Interdisciplinary Work
I sat, tapping a pen on the desk and staring into a spreadsheet with a list of my Carolina Core requirements. There was no way around it: I would have to take a literature course. It was my freshman year of college, and I thought that I hated fiction. After all, I could not make it more than three pages into the books that my classmates had fallen in love with—dystopian pieces, science fiction works, and fantasy novels. So how would I make it through an entire literature course? But requirements are requirements, and I signed up for SCHC 270, Comparative World Literature. Imagine my surprise when I showed up for a lecture about…coverture. At the time, this legal system that prevented married women from holding property was my independent research subject. But we tackled the institution from an entirely new angle by putting it in conversation with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, an autobiographical graphic novel that discusses the experience of girlhood amid the Iranian Revolution.
Each of our books in the course similarly challenged me to consider a familiar history through a new lens. Kafka’s Metamorphosis allowed us to explore psychoanalysis, Marx’s theory of alienation, and anti-semitism. Duras's The Lover was a gateway to post-modernism, semiotics, second-wave feminism, and the construction of memory; Things Fall Apart taught us about Igbo culture and imperialism; and Garden of the Forking Paths emerged us in Argenitian Politics and Henri Bergson’s theories of temporality. Through these discussions, literary theory itself introduced me to philosophies of history, time, and memory.
Literary theory also challenged me to more critically approach the writing of history. It made me realize that many historians describe local actors by employing common literary tropes.
Literary theory also challenged me to more critically approach the writing of history. It made me realize that many historians describe historical actors by employing common literary tropes. In the case of army women, scholars draw from a long tradition of women warrior tropes. (For my analysis of these tropes in Othello, see Artifact 1.) Or sometimes they are influenced by the seductive femme fatale by painting all army women as dangerous seductresseses. Ever since scholars like Mercy Otis Warren and Benson Lossing described army women in these terms in the early nineteenth century, historians have continued reinscribing them; they often do so by citing secondary sources without interrogating primary evidence themselves. The best way to challenge these pervasive paradigms, I learned, is not to simply argue they are false: it is to go deeper by uncovering the myths’ origins and tracing their development.
ARTIFACT 1
I wrote the below essay for SCHC 450, Melville and Shakespeare. It studies the army woman in Shakespeare's Othello. This paper required me to draw on sources that I use in my historical research, like military manuals, but apply them in a new context to approach the army woman from a literary perspective.
In the Classroom: SCHC 450 Essay
Learning Applications
Exploration and Magellan Scholar grants gave me the opportunity to apply my classroom learning by jointly analyzing military service records, literature, and the arts (like operas) relating to army women. (For the product of my Exploration Grant research, see Artifact 2.) Although historians today commonly argue that military officers derided army women as camp followers who consumed rations while offering little but venereal disease in return, I discovered that no one used this term until the late eighteenth century, after the war. It emerged in limited use as a gendered slur in newspapers, but became especially popular in the early nineteenth century. Then, writers picked up the camp follower trope, most apparently in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy. Cooper’s Betty Flanagan is the archetypal camp follower: she is a feisty Irish immigrant known for her “love of liquor, excessive filthiness, and . . . total disregard for all the decencies of language.” Indeed, when she reprimands a sergeant for preparing too slowly for battle, he scoffs, “I am not to be told my duty by a camp follower.” Authors applied the same characteristics to the now-iconic Molly Pitcher, first written about as a “stout, red-haired, freckled-faced young Irish woman” who died “of a syphilitic disease.” My research led me to understand that when historians unconsciously force their subjects into the same trope—for example, by describing them as “nuisances” and “prostitutes”—they create misleading and historical paradigms.
In my 2021 online Discover UofSC poster, I included a section about the camp follower trope, which was heavily influenced by my literary studies. You can access my online poster here.
Beyond the Classroom: Discover UofSC Poster
ARTIFACT 2
Although literature has perhaps most profoundly influenced my research, I have had the opportunity to study the development of memory and paradigms with other forms of content, too. In SCHC 367 (Experimental Music Workshop), we studied how music can create or subvert group identities. And in SCHC 421, the History of Senses, we meticulously analyzed references to the senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) in songs from 1960 to 2000. We then calculated the proportion of words in each song that refer to all of these senses collectively, as well as each sense individually. Lyricists incorporate the senses into songs differently over time, and this indicates broader historical changes. For instance, increasing references to touch after 1970 point to the impact of the sexual revolution and increasingly tactile technologies, like the haptic iPhone or interactive Walkman. Again, music and art made me realize that people have historically used senses (i.e. hapticity) and competing modes of communication (audio radio versus visual television, etc.) to construct, reinforce, or challenge group identity. In the short term, I plan on applying this learning in my senior thesis by studying how the significance of source mediums (physical artifacts, written documents, oral histories, etc.) and national memory formation. My undergraduate thesis elaborates on this subject. It shows that when poor army women and male veterans demanded federal financial assistance after the American War for Independence, politicians and printers undermined their claims by slandering them as camp followers: parasites who consumed rations without offering anything but venereal disease in return. They did so in newspapers, in plays, in novels (like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy), and in official histories. Although army women could not write, they challenged the camp follower narrative material and oral histories. The women gave oral accounts of service in court and called on neighbors, ministers, and former officers to do the same. One positioned herself as a contributor to independence by sewing her brothers’ uniforms into a rug. Others rooted themselves to specific places by sharing plundered items. When this failed, veterans offered their bodies as artifacts by pointing to their injuries as visible signs of service.
In addition to writing about this subject in my senior thesis, I will also present my findings at a British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) conference in April 2022. (See my paper proposal as Artifact 3 below.)
ARTIFACT 3
Beyond the Classroom: BrANCH Paper Proposal
In April 2022, I will present a paper on my study of contested early national memory to the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) Nineteenth-Century America in Atlantic Context Conference. Below is my paper proposal.
But these lessons will not only shape my research path; they will also guide my interactions with students. This year, I served as a Magellan Ambassador for the Office of Undergraduate Research. In this role, I presented to eleven University 101 (first-year student) classes about here. The students drafted practice research questions that they might send to potential advisors or use on grant applications. In the classroom, I challenge them to see how they can use multiple disciplines to study the topic. For example, many students wanted to study how social media impacts constituents’ political ideologies. This topic might involve political science, media studies, psychology, sociology, history, advertising, and legal studies. When they wanted to further pursue interdisciplinary research, I used my own
Giving a Magellan Ambassador presentation to a UNIV 101 class during Fall 2021
experiences to walk them through the process of having multiple advisors from different departments. In the future, I hope to continue introducing students to different disciplines in the classroom by assigning readings from history, literature, anthropology and archaeology, etc. I imagined how this would look in the classroom by designing a syllabus for a memory studies course. (See Artifact 4.) When assigned together, these sources can encourage students to evaluate how disciplines may challenge or clarify each other’s paradigms.
ARTIFACT 4
In the Classroom: HIST 720 Practice Syllabus
Summary