Of the five Brackenridge Fellows in my cohort, I am the only one working on a pure humanities project. One of my cohort members, Harsh, is working on a project studying ischemic stroke risk among individuals of African descent. Grace, another member of my cohort, is working on research in the field of neuroscience. The third member of my cohort, Armani, is working on a project that studies cell cycle plasticity in human health and disease. The final member of my cohort, Adam, is studying the effect of flood patterns on housing prices in the United Kingdom. 

That the projects of the fellows in my cohort differ so greatly from mine excites me. History has, historically (hah!), been a field of study that encourages working in solitude. The stereotypical historian spends their days alone in an archive reviewing primary sources and their evenings alone in their office writing about said primary sources. It is often thought that there is very little room—or reason—for collaborative work in history. I disagree.

Though I may not be able to learn anything directly from the projects of my fellow Brackenridge recipients—it’s hard to see how neuroscience relates to the formation of the American identity in eighteenth-century New England—I do believe that there are things I can learn from those recipients themselves. For example, by working alongside Harsh, I might gain a greater understanding of how to respectfully and ethically research marginalized communities. Or, by working alongside Adam, I might learn how to better look out for relationships between two seemingly unrelated variables. I think it is for this reason that I found Adam’s project the most interesting. Like my own, his begins with a hypothesized connection between two seemingly unrelated events/variables. These “soft skills” are things that I think can and will greatly improve the quality of my work. Working collaboratively across disciplines is an excellent way to transmit these soft skills and is something I hope becomes more commonplace in the field of historical study. 

This is not to say that interdisciplinary work is without its difficulties. One obstacle that often stands in the way of such work is a lack of a shared vocabulary across disciplines. This is why I think that the readings, discussions, and exercises with which we have engaged in the first few weeks of our seminar are so crucially important; they “level the playing field” by equipping us with the vocabulary we need to communicate effectively across disciplines. This will not only prove useful now while working with our cohort members but will also prove immeasurably valuable when it comes time for us to communicate our research to a wider audience that may not be as familiar with the academic jargon of our respective disciplines as we are.