Monique O’Connell HI Tenth Anniversary Tribute

Being a department chair is not an interdisciplinary enterprise. As the chair of the history department, my days are taken up with planning history course offerings, managing the concerns of history students, and responding to the needs of history faculty members. One might think that under these circumstances, an interdisciplinary Humanities Institute would not be relevant.  In fact, I have come to appreciate the HI in an entirely different way after becoming department chair. As an individual faculty member, I benefitted from the HI’s support of digital scholarship and interdisciplinary reading groups.  As chair, I have seen the HI’s ability to reach out to communities in the College and in Winston Salem and amplify the reach of what any single department could accomplish on its own.

Soon after its 2010 foundation, the HI took a leading role in championing the possibilities of the Digital Humanities at Wake.  In my own digital humanities project, which predates both the HI and ZSR’s DISC, I had often found it difficult to navigate between the different and sometimes fragmented institutional homes of digital scholarship.  The HI changed that by creating a community of scholars interested in digital work; this group allowed me to connect with others on campus doing similar projects, brought in speakers, and allowed me to share my own experiments and learn from others in the wonderfully open “DH Kitchens.” In 2018, an HI summer grant allowed me to work with a team in ZSR to revise and re-envision my own project, Rulers of Venice.  But from a chair’s-eye view, the impact of the HI has gone beyond supporting individual faculty projects—it has played a key role in promoting digital scholarship as a worthwhile—and tenureable—intellectual concern of faculty and not just a series of technical problems to overcome. It has thus opened up the possibility of new approaches to knowledge in the realm of both research and pedagogy.

As an individual faculty member, I also participated in several interdisciplinary faculty reading groups—the ones on the Silk Road and the early Modern Mediterranean stand out as particularly generative for my research and for my teaching.  I find the chance to think together with faculty expert in a wide variety of fields an important exercise in considering historical problems from new perspectives.  Many if not most of the history department faculty have also participated in their own interdisciplinary groups.  My colleagues’ interdisciplinary engagement with faculty across the university strengthens our department commitment to interdisciplinary minors and programs, connecting the study of history to many other relevant disciplines.

Over the last few years, the history department has aimed to build a community beyond faculty and students at Wake, reaching out to the Winston Salem community through sponsoring and co-sponsoring public events.  The HI has been an invaluable partner in our attempts to build an engaged and dynamic community of faculty, students, staff, alums, and neighbors who see history as a valuable framework for interpreting the world. An example of this type of partnership is our support of the conference “Landscape, Race and Culture: Shaping a World of Color,” September 26-28, 2019 at Old Salem Museums & Gardens.

Most broadly, the HI keeps reminding all of us of our collective reason for being here: the Why of the Humanities.  No matter how wonderful one’s colleagues and engaged one’s students, being the chair of an academic department involves a large number of practical administrative tasks. It is easy to put purpose on the bottom of one’s to-do list. For many years, I had a quote from essayist Mark Slouka in my office reminding me of why I think the humanities are valuable; it reads, “The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be.”[1] Since 2010, the HI’s events and programming have acted as a continual reminder to me, and to the rest of the WFU community, of the purpose that animates our many moments of practical endeavor.  For that, I offer both gratitude and celebration for the HI’s 10-year anniversary and wish it many more happy and productive years!

Monique O’Connell, History

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/dehumanized/