St Leonards Interdisciplinary Research Festival: 'In The Wild'

Description

I was a flash-talk speaker at St Andrews' first interdisciplinary research festival, with a talk entitled 'The Lone Interdisciplinarian', intended to provoke a roundtable discussion and workshop between attendees.
Abstract:
This paper interrogates the figure of the “lone interdisciplinarian,” challenging the conceptual dominance of interdisciplinary research as collaboration and distributed expertise. Drawing from my own experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, applying approaches from multiple disciplines to examine literary “late style,” I explore a tension between my lived interdisciplinary practice and institutional and theoretical representations of interdisciplinarity. Through a mixed-methods approach combining reflective critique with a dataset of over 1,500 articles from journals explicitly identified as interdisciplinary, I identify a bimodal distribution where science-leaning interdisciplinary publications overwhelmingly favour multi-authored, collaborative outputs, while humanities-oriented interdisciplinary work remains predominantly single-authored. This divergence suggests the persistence of a “fault-line” within interdisciplinarity itself, echoing and complicating C. P. Snow’s account of the divide between the sciences and humanities in his 1959 Rede Lecture, ‘The Two Cultures’. Reframing interdisciplinarity through literary theory, the paper uses T. S. Eliot’s concept of “Tradition” and his late poem, Little Gidding, alongside Walt Whitman’s poetics of multiplicity, to identify the elusive ‘lone interdisciplinarian’: the individual scholar as “compound-ghost” of disciplinary voices, and using this figure to provoke roundtable discussions on whether interdisciplinarity must be collaborative to be legitimate, or whether solitary, synthetic modes of knowledge production represent an equally valid—and under-recognised—form, and how institutional structures, funding models, and disciplinary norms might better accommodate and represent divergent practices, or whether they ought to converge to an ‘ideal’ version of interdisciplinarity.

Period	10 Mar 2026
Event type	Conference
Conference number	1
Location	St Andrews, Fife, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	Regional