Kids Need Interdiscipline This seminar will serve several purposes. First, it will acquaint new graduate students with the history of the discipline and critical methodologies. Second, it will bring students into contact with interdisciplinary work and subsequent reconsiderations of disciplinarity. Third, it will allow faculty who participate in interdisciplinary work groups to introduce students in the department to the type of work they currently pursue.

Jigsaw Pedagogy Duke University has made a very clear signature investment as an institution in developing interdisciplinarity - especially across school divides (i.e. medicine and arts and sciences). While lauding this development at Duke, a recent external review of the Department of English noted that the department was acting as a "donor" department, lending out faculty to interdisciplinary programs, leaving a problematic imbalance of payments. We thought it would be interesting to undertake a study of disciplinarity itself at the department and University levels in the form of pegagogy. This will also allow us to tap into faculty from other departments who are interested in exploring their own disciplinary approaches through interdisciplinary pedagogy.

Working and Teaching in Progress The development of an elective seminar for graduate students, specifically aimed at addressing the topic of disciplinarity. We hope to integrate the teaching of both disciplinary precdent and interdisciplinary innovation by allowing faculty to model and situate their own evolving research practices.

Diverse Resources The creation of a new course fits in with our recent overhaul of the graduate course work requirements without compromising the flexibility they are desgined to sustain. A roster of rotating presenters will function not only to allow a range of disciplinary perspectives but also to diversify the perspectives surveyed on the practice of interdisciplinarity itself.

Methodology Students will be expected to consider and articulate various positions and procedures related to various forms of literary and cultural criticism, with the hope that this experience will influence their subsequent critical practice.

Follow-up Tasks Students will produce written critiques of the course and detail their subsequent understanding of what concerns are central to research and teaching in the discipline of literary studies. We expect that training with this level of self-reflection will facilitate later tasks of self-description, such as research abstracts, grant proposals, and teaching statements. With training in various ways to articulate intellectual practice, students will gain fluency in locating their work in relation to a range of scholarly discussion.