Blogging across Disciplinary Boundaries

Having recently hung up my doctoral tam as a full-time professor, I’m looking ahead to a new, or renewed, professional life. To support that life, I’ve created a new website and migrated my old blog over to it.

I’m keeping the name Frontiers and Borderlands (the most recent title), which originally aimed at capturing my professional historical interests in Native-European encounters in early America. But not without some uncertainty about the title.

The “frontier” has been a key concept in my professional life as a historian (more on this below), but looking forward, I don’t intend to be permanently moored in the disciplinary harbor of historical studies nor strictly tied to frontier studies per se. Having taught in a great books program and instructionally dabbled in science fiction, I can imagine the occasional blog in those areas. I’m also interested in neurodiversity and my struggle to be successful in academia with ADHD. Then there’s the outdoors, fly fishing, and environmental issues (for example “Restoring Biodiversity in an Oregon Ravine”). Role-immersion pedagogy became a centerpiece of my teaching in the last decade while my interest in board games has surged in recent years. And what about bringing historical perspective to contemporary politics?

So I’m feeling some pressure to adopt a name for my blog that covers broader ground than “frontiers and borderlands” apparently does.

But early in graduate school, I was introduced to the concept of the frontier as a “zone of cultural interaction” (see the introduction to my first book). Lots has been written before and since then about frontiers and borderlands but throughout I’ve remained interested in the ways borders are permeable and how people, ideas, and material goods (among other things) cross and transcend borders (such as my edited volume, Permeable Borders).

And even though I’ve been staunchly committed as a scholar to a well-defined discipline of history, I’m interested in lots of different things and different approaches (after all, I changed, added, and dropped several different majors throughout college). Leading seminars in a great books program with a generous canon invited lots of inter-, pan-, and non-disciplinary thinking and discussions, which I deeply appreciated. And science fiction has always interested me because of the big questions it asks and the wide intellectual terrain it traverses.

But more importantly, I think I’ve never liked boundaries or limitations (deep ironies here that perhaps I’ll explore on this blog some day) – I find social conventions difficult to follow, I chafe at artificial structures and imposed lines of authority, and I’m intrigued by the nuances of particular circumstances and the in-between spaces.

I also worry that as I chart a new course forward, pursuing my diverse interests in a catch-all professional website and blog will lead to some freakish future as pictured by William Heath in his 1829 cartoon critique of the March of Intellect — a progress-oriented movement of English Whigs in the early nineteenth century. 

On the other hand, the cartoon itself captures some of my fascination with history, ideas, and science fiction . . .

So for me, the concept of frontiers and borderlands has much deeper significance than a just historical framework for understanding ethnic, national, and cultural encounters in early America. Insofar as the phrase may capture my personal and professional questions about boundaries, my interest in diverse subjects and ideas, and my willingness to explore through reading, playing, and trekking outdoors, I think I’ll keep “Frontiers and Borderlands” as the name for this blog, while adding “Blogging across Disciplinary Boundaries.”