In the first few weeks of the Brackenridge Fellowship, our weekly seminars have been focused on building a common understanding of what research is and how to approach research from interdisciplinary angles. This week, we were able to talk about interdisciplinary research in our official cohorts, smaller groups within the Brackenridge fellowship with a mix of people doing STEM, social science, and humanities research. I really enjoyed getting to know the other members of my cohort because, even though our topics and approaches to research are different, everyone shared a passion for applying our academic and personal interests to independent research. While I may not be able to learn from the methodologies that other members of my cohort are using in their research, I hope to learn more about how they communicate their research to better understand how to make my own work more accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. 

Since my project has a humanities focus, I saw the most obvious similarity between my project and Jon’s, a member of my cohort studying the audiences of pro-wrestling matches. Even though I’m studying the relationship between climate and colonial perceptions of piracy in seventeenth-century New England while he looks at modern perceptions of professional wrestling, I think our research shares a common purpose in understanding how people respond to things they observe. This has become really interesting to me in studying the history of Atlantic piracy because so much of the recent scholarship on the topic has shifted towards analyzing pirates using sources produced by non-piratical figures such as merchants and colonial governors, so I’m really interested in learning more about how Jon analyzes and describes audience perceptions in his research to see if there is any language I can use to make my own writing more precise and impactful.

I think the main benefit in working with people across disciplines, within my cohort for the Brackenridge and in general, is that it makes your work more informed and meaningful. That sounds cheesy but talking to people in different areas, even in fields that seemingly have no relationship to your own, can open your eyes to concepts that you had no idea existed. While I might not discuss Alzheimer’s research in my work, to use an example from another project in my cohort, talking to people who do that kind of research about what they think good research is does influence the way I write to convince a broad audience that my work is well-researched, meaningful, and relevant. Of course, there will be obstacles in this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration because different fields have different priorities, purposes, and even vocabularies for research, but I think that continuing these conversations about research with people in different fields this summer will only improve our ability to communicate our research across the disciplines.