Program Highlight | Spring 2005
ISERP Graduate Fellows Program
Asked to describe the Graduate Fellows Program, I realized we invite students to engage interdisciplinary exploration even as they struggle to develop disciplinary capacity. Throughout graduate school, students work to understand what historians or sociologists or economists or Â… are about, what constitutes good work in their fields and how they can do it. And they strive to develop a professional identity based on these competencies. But then, as students achieve some disciplinary understanding and identity and write their dissertations, our program asks them to take on the puzzles, methods, and approaches of diverse disciplines. Even more, unlike many interdisciplinary efforts, we do not organize around a problem to be analyzed through the contributions of multiple disciplines. We employ no such device. Rather, we gather around the specific disciplinary interests, problems, and techniques each fellow brings to the program.
These qualities are the mainsprings of our program's intellectual accomplishments. At this point in their careers, students may be more willing and able to engage other disciplines than before or after, and so to continue this engagement beyond graduate school. As a result, it may be fair to say, fellows develop greater depth, complexity, and subtlety in their work, simultaneously developing disciplinary competency and extending disciplinary boundaries, approaches, and methods. An economist's paper on the border between law and economics, for example, emphasized the efficiency of procedural speed as meaningfully capturing the notion of justice—a fundamental premise for the importance of the paper. This equivalence may go unnoticed among economists, but was challenged by the fellows, making it possible for the economist to untangle the presumed relationship between efficiency, speed, and justice. Conversely, an historian's encounter with fellows' faith and dexterity in quantitative techniques forced him to understand the difference between "numericism" and "empiricism," and to realize that important questions of his work could not be answered numerically. Specifically, this meant that understanding the development of dominant religious nationalism in the early United States could not be answered by counts like how many people joined a particular religious organization, but had to take into account empirical realities like presidents invoking theological justifications to have the national government act beyond its design and confiscate property. And a paper on 17th century shipping trade showed how network theory and methods could be used to identify the importance of individual agency—a crucial issue for sociology and anthropology—in a way that challenged the idea at the heart of the principal/agent problem so dear to economics and political science. These are just a few examples of a kind of collective and individual intellectual accomplishment the fellows program has well developed.
But these accomplishments are not only intellectual. One effect of our interdisciplinary discourse is that fellows are frequently accepted into major interdisciplinary post-doctoral programs at Michigan, Stanford, Washington University, Nuffield College, Oxford, the University of Washington, and elsewhere. Alums are also taking faculty positions at major research universities from Berkeley to Yale and the usual suspects in between. And they are producing papers for top journals in their fields and writing well-received books—David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003) perhaps most known among them. It would be silly for the program to claim responsibility for these accomplishments; but we think—and alums report—that the intellectual conversations of the ISERP seminar and hallways were important for their success. Applications
The Graduate Fellows Program provides dissertation-level students in the social sciences and cognate fields with material and intellectual support to complete their dissertations and to expand their disciplinary breadth. Fellows meet twice monthly to present their works-in-progress. They receive office space, computers, technical assistance, and research/administrative support as well as help preparing job talks. Fellows are appointed for one year, with a possible second-year renewal. The application deadline is April 15.
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