The Problem of Intradisciplinarity

Alison Booth and Miriam Posner open the introduction to their Varieties of DH PMLA special issue by pondering the locations—discursive, geographic, ideological—of the digital humanities: “It seems inappropriate to call this a burgeoning or nascent field, still less a hot new thing [. . .] yet these clichés feel inescapable as one attempts to describe a field that has yet to coalesce around a set of methods or assumptions” (“Introduction,” 9). As their prefatory remarks frame so thoroughly, even admitting its critical parameters are nebulous by design, or that its failure of totalizing definition is partly its benefit, the “digital humanities” is a tremendously messy container that still does not travel all that well, especially among U.S. English departments.1

Because this collection has invited us to think about (and through) such travel and its pathways of graduate work in the digital humanities, I want to address an obstacle along the route: in certain circumstances, the debate about DH’s definition and its efficacy as a discipline has ended up leveraged against English graduate study in the digital humanities. In U.S. English departments (and, indeed, in many other humanities disciplines in large PhD-granting research institutions), graduate students invested even nominally in digital methods are suspended regularly within the institutional and departmental politics that follow from DH’s disciplinary indeterminacy.2 More specifically, graduate students in English studies who work in DH but attend institutions lacking explicit social infrastructure for DH (e.g., centers, faculty lines, training programs, research support, and funding) may still find themselves caught up in the emergence of the field’s intradisciplinarity, in its somehow-still-alienness among long-since accepted approaches in the humanities, particularly in departments that have resisted, or that have been late to adopt, digital approaches to humanistic study. Among other forms of accepted critical work in U.S. English departments, like those organized by period, theory, geography, identity, or various other cultural, social, or political angles of critique and its legacies, DH stands academically in between, with a disciplinary status that varies from university to university and department to department. I aim to point out the effect this inconsistency can have on graduate student futures in U.S. English departments.

Whether the question is of its novelty, its critical value, its sustainable relevance, its masquerade as humanist inquiry, its disguised history of surveillance capitalism and public data accumulation, its complicity in administrative neoliberalization, or its role in American universities’ ballooning corporatism, many decision-making faculty and administrators within the humanities seem incredulous of (or at least conflicted about) DH as a discipline and thus as an institutionalizable realm of graduate work.3 And, to be fair, just as these anxieties have compelling counterarguments, most of them also have merit. The oft-latent forces and investments that legitimize critical areas and modes of study in English have, in close to equal measure, valorized and villainized the digital humanities as both area and mode, so I want to first clarify that I do not mean to claim falsely some sort of critical oppression. The institutional horror stories and embittered denials of feminist critique, queer theory, and critical race studies (and the poststructuralism that preceded them) prove there are far more insidious forms of gatekeeping in U.S. higher education. Resistance to the codification of these approaches shares an oppressive politics of inaccess and inequity, and the stakes of DH’s contest for wider disciplinary legitimation are neither of the same degree nor, perhaps, even of the same kind. In some cases, however, it does have similar effects, and despite the volume of critical accounts that assess the split between adopters and nonadopters of DH in U.S. English departments, DH’s influence on the everyday politics of English graduate study in the U.S. has never been fully addressed.4

Let me offer a broad example, which I think many DH graduate students, but especially those unattached to mainstream DH programs, will find familiar. I am a recent PhD graduate in English from a public R1 university that does not explicitly boast a dedicated DH contingent. The English department has an association with a university humanistic research center (which is often DH adjacent), and we have had tremendous digital scholarship librarians; however, we also have departmental faculty deeply suspicious of the rise of DH in humanities departments generally (again, not without good reason). The result of this seesaw of DH support is that to those outside the broad fields of the digital humanities, which in my case included at least a dissertation director, a director of graduate studies, a department head, teaching faculty, and myriad nonspecialist committees and their members, I sometimes dabbled in “the digital humanities,” a hazy side-interest that had no real bearing on my graduate work or eventual degree. Drop me around other digital humanists, however, or in the middle of a DH conference, or the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, or any other established arena of DH study and community, and I suddenly work with (among other things) various kinds of computational formalism and digital literary study to explore the styles of twentieth-century literature. To amend the title of Ted Underwood’s hopeful state-of-the-field writeup from 2019, this is “[still only] Digital Humanities as a Semi-Normal Thing” (“Digital Humanities as a Semi-Normal Thing,” 96).

After years of conversations with English faculty across the DH spectrum, I am no longer convinced the above disparity between non-DH and DH scholars is merely English studies’ habitual differentiation of in-group versus out-group, in-specialty versus out-of-specialty. Whereas the latter’s supportive stance acknowledges the already institutionalized, methodological nuance of a field that captures a certain kind of epistemic authority, more often than not the vague gesturing of the former is a shoulder shrug toward a nonentity, or, at least, a distinctly foreign, distinctly non-English research practice. Among U.S. English colleagues and mentors outside of DH and its longstanding institutions, we often simply do “DH” and so, too, are often simply “DH people.” But to those outside of other primary areas of English studies, for instance—which might entail, for the sake of argument, early American racial politics, affect, and nineteenth-century settler colonialism—one often simply does, well, early American racial politics, affect, and nineteenth-century settler colonialism. The same terminal definitions rarely apply. Although departmental quirks abound, that institutionalized split between the digitals and the antidigitals does not seem to exist, or does not exist in the same way, for any other methodology currently taught in English studies. To be sure, the pro- versus anti-DH dynamics in some U.S. English departments are particularly strong, and perhaps few of those experiences apply globally. For those in non-Anglophone or non-English departments, and especially those studying non-English topics, languages, or contexts, these sorts of administrative and institutional marginalizations may be doubly familiar. But this limitation of the culture of English studies, or of what Jacob Richter and Hannah Taylor term in chapter 28 in this volume the discipline’s “rhetorical infrastructure,” seems to me a significant and often unremarked difference in the normal social politics of U.S. English departments and their graduate students’ professionalization.

After all, laying claim to digital expertise in the humanities can earn the indifference, disinterest, or suspicion of both nondigital and antidigital scholars, a refusal of critical relevance that digital humanists have normalized in service of playing well with others. However, in U.S. English programs without specific DH alliances—and, for me, this is key—the resulting political negotiation (whether departmental, institutional, or disciplinary) often falls squarely and solely upon affected graduate students. Intellectual delineations quickly turn into time-intensive social labors, and we must always be wary of hidden lines in the sociocritical sand as we pursue our trendy form of scholarship. As we navigate the administrative contours of earning an advanced degree, we are also tasked with differentiating the techno-utopian faculty from the mere DH friendlies, the digital nonnatives from the anti-DH scholars, the nondigital media historians from the antidigital media theorists, and on and on. So polarizing are these splits, in fact, that they introduce their own functional limitations for graduate work. Opposing views do not generally play well together on our committees, at our organized talks, and in other arenas of our academic training, all of which may require different sorts of approval from those on one side of the DH debate or the other. A project might seem too digital to one and not digital enough to another; a chapter might convincingly deploy computational methods for one but incompatibly for another; a syllabus may look too DH-y or not DH-y enough; and an invited speaker may be too focused on DH’s critique or highlight too limitedly its benefit. In departments with no dedicated DH faculty or in-house DH institute, both of which tend to demand an alignment with certain (digitally receptive) scholarly politics, DH-adjacent graduate students must tiptoe carefully, lest our intellectual choices offend or irritate or—worse—foreclose professional futures. As scholars, the ways we are legible to nondigital faculty, mentors, and advisors are also generally nondigital, and the many benefits of joining the digital with the humanities are dismissed when DH, as an investment of our time and critical labors, is weighed always against traditional English graduate training. Collaborate, but not too much; pursue digital skills, but not too many; contribute to digital projects, but not too often. The ideal academic balance looks different at each non-DH English department and program in the United States, but too many seem to agree that the game is zero-sum—that, at some point or another, these scholars-in-training must prove that their forms of scholarship and academic work can look traditional, recognizable, and like they are supposed to.

As a manner of disciplinary reduction, the “DH person” shorthand certainly is not helped by DH’s vast critical boundary lines, as Booth and Posner note (“Introduction,” 9). But what I want to make clear is that this lax moniker is not always (or ever just) the innocent unfamiliarity or willful naiveté of nonexpertise. It is indicative of erasures of insight, of specialty, and for U.S. English graduate students in particular, of other sorts of mastery-in-training. Once we set foot across the DH fence line, in some ways we can no longer step back over. Our realm of study solidifies, and we cease to be students of anything else. In that moment where our varieties of thinking are presumed and thus concretized, to the DH skeptic, we no longer look like students at all, just looming specters of things most feared: pawns of stagnant thinking; empirical conquerors of nuance; practitioners of misapplied and ill-understood methodologies; a clique of neoliberal quants; apprentices to an invading, corporatizing order; and actors complicit in the ends of a whole discipline.

In the context of DH’s intradisciplinary limits at non-DH US institutions, I do not think we fully grasp the effects our crisis-laden moment is having on the intersecting futures of DH and English studies. Under normal circumstances, this oppositional dialectic may have fallen under the umbrella of routine critical squabble. Yet even bearing in mind our discipline’s long reliance on the normalcy of crisis, as Travis Bartley stresses in chapter 4 in this volume, these are not normal circumstances. Allying with one side over another, or, as I am suggesting, merely appearing to hold certain alliances over others, garners many bad-faith assumptions, and U.S. graduate students will find themselves squarely in the fray. Our easy disciplinary stereotyping has specific effects for humanities graduate students, as scholars who (lest we go a day without a reminder) have already chosen fading disciplines, who confront exponential professional precarity, who face historically depressed markets, who in the wake of a global pandemic have undergone imminent hiring freezes and search interruptions, who look toward professional futures under indefinite suspension, and who enter a realm of market logic that is much worse than usual, and which was already the worst it had ever been.

Just as these near-constant, proliferating stresses of uncertainty affect graduate student teaching and research output (directions, topics, load, and pace), so too do they affect the ways we present, are taught to present, and are asked to present ourselves as scholars. This self-cultivation manifests most commonly in the ways our job-market preparation, training, and advice demands that we circulate (or do not) our scholarly likenesses, and there seem to be no shared best practices for applicants or hiring committees. If, to the non- or anti-DH disciplinary vanguard in many U.S. English departments, I simply “do DH” and thus am always already (and only) a “DH person,” then what, exactly, do I look like in a job market that variously tightens and expands its desired candidate profiles, in a field that cannot decide whether or not what I do is worth institutionalizing?

I am really after two claims here: first, that there is an uncareful and unhelpful confluence of DH methodologies, fields, and scholarly identities; and second, that this quirk is not really a quirk at all but a disciplinary feature that has turned into a very real mechanism of power wielded (in U.S. English departments, at least) for the purposes of disciplinary gatekeeping and which requires regular, unpaid emotional and social labor from its already thinly stretched graduate students. In some departments, what this boils down to is the handwashing of entire subfields of humanistic inquiry and English study, simply because that study is taking place through digital approaches that may not really belong. And one result of that broad uncare is a totalizing reduction of scholarly nuance that renders, deliberately, an overly generalized conception of DH as a singular, enigmatic, possibly malevolent entity. In doing so, U.S. faculty and administrators tend to reify the issue, imagining the place of this “DH” in the future study of English in unhelpful and vague ways, or not at all.

Of course, it does seem easy to point to a PMLA special issue, a university-backed journal, a new research center, a longstanding national fellowship, or an internationally renowned graduate program and say, “Relax, DH is here to stay.” What else could “making it” even look like for a subdiscipline of the humanities? If a humanities student finds he or she wants to study digital methods, why not choose a program dedicated to such things? Is DH’s absence from only certain programs, departments, or university administrations really all that different than any other field of study in the humanities? Do all research areas not foster specific departmental alliances, institutional densities, and disciplinary limitations? Does an essay on the poetics of twentieth-century Caribbean literature not face the same hurdles (or more) to publication and circulation as a DH piece on twentieth-century poetic style? As far as disciplinary gatekeeping is concerned, DH does not exactly have it bad, and as U.S. English students with theoretical access to much deeper networks of funding than our peers, perhaps neither do we (Allington et al., “Neoliberal Tools”).

Regardless of the public recognition of our discipline, in non-DH-heavy U.S. English departments, the authorization of both our scholarship and our status as scholars is still up in the air. It is a fact truer still in programs with a high density of faculty (or faculty-in-power) resistant to the sanction of DH as a subdiscipline of English studies, faculty who help determine, for many of the same graduate students, the uneven territories of funding, mentorship, assistantships, teaching assignments, time to degree, and other types of institutional access and support. These alone can represent serious, forgotten, often hidden material effects on graduate students’ lives and professional futures, and so too on disciplinary health. So if we are thinking through DH’s disciplinary thoroughfares, we should not ignore the dissonant limbo of its intradisciplinarity; it marks an ideological roadblock to which we have long given a wide berth but which at some point may need clearing.