On Col­lab­o­ration

In this position paper, rather than high­lighting new cor­puses of study or dis­cussing my own par­ticular research, I want to make a more global argument about the position of inter­dis­ci­plinary fields within today’s academy and open up a dis­cussion about what Mediter­ranean studies, Iberian Studies, and early modern His­panism might look like as a set of truly col­lab­o­rative, inter­secting fields. I argue that such col­lab­o­ration not only would open up new areas of inquiry but may in fact be nec­essary in the real­ities of the con­tracting human­ities and social sci­ences job market. This reality has become only more urgent amidst the spate of hiring freezes across the academy since the out­break of COVID-19 this year.

Method­olog­i­cally, Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies as fields rely on a set of approaches that respond organ­i­cally to the diverse primary sources of the late antique, medieval, and early modern, and modern archives. Rather than allowing our­selves to be con­strained by the arti­ficial bound­aries of our world today, scholars of both the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediter­ranean basin have instead sought to approach these inter­secting regions by fol­lowing the logic and orga­nizing systems of the archives and spaces. In doing so, they have demon­strated that pre­modern Mediter­ranean soci­eties and cul­tures under­stood the Middle Sea as a place of intense social, eco­nomic, political, and intel­lectual exchange. By dis­placing “the nation as the default cat­egory of analysis,” Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies respond to the complex mul­ti­lingual, mul­ti­ethnic and con­fes­sionally diverse real­ities of the pre-modern Iberian Peninsula and Mediter­ranean basin ^[1]. In con­trast, the insti­tu­tional struc­tures in which these diverse spaces are studied con­tinue to be bound by, as Sharon Kinoshita says, the “exi­gencies of nineteenth-century national ide­ologies.” Even if we work in admin­is­trative units like Romance lan­guages, Iberian and Latin American Cul­tures, or Near Eastern studies, which promise mul­ti­lingual and mul­ti­cul­tural approaches, many of us con­tinue to spend the bulk of our time teaching courses that serve nation­alist agendas ^[2].

The win­nowing down of the job market across the human­ities and social sci­ences has the potential to further chill intel­lectual inno­vation in inter­dis­ci­plinary con­texts. If a department believes it needs to cover certain courses for an under­graduate major, will it be willing to take a risk on a junior scholar whose training does not squarely map onto the cov­erage model (i.e., an Iberi­anist rather than a tra­di­tionally trained, Cervantes-focusing His­panist)? Despite the fun­da­men­tally inter­dis­ci­plinary nature of our research, we are con­strained by these insti­tu­tional para­meters that tend to dis­in­cen­tivize lin­guis­ti­cally, cul­turally, and geo­graph­i­cally diverse research. Bearing in mind such struc­tural lim­i­ta­tions, I suggest that the next step in Mediter­ranean Studies must be extensive coop­er­ation among scholars not just in edited volumes or at con­fer­ences, but in article or book-length projects in which col­lab­o­rators work together exten­sively to elu­cidate a shared intel­lectual question that they cannot answer working alone.

In the human­ities, this is gen­erally not the model we have adopted. Rather, we have fol­lowed and con­tinue to follow an out­dated Romantic vision of the genius intel­lectual that ges­tates and births his work of genius working entirely alone. Hiring and tenure processes con­tinue to pri­or­itize the mono­graph as the most desirable mode of research pro­duction in the human­ities, as well as mono­graph peer-reviewed articles, fol­lowed dis­tantly by mono­graph, peer-reviewed con­tri­bu­tions to edited volumes. As recently as four years ago as a graduate student, I was advised by several dif­ferent senior scholars to pri­or­itize these forms of peer-reviewed pub­li­ca­tions over all else—the message was: “Get tenure first, then branch out.” And while con­tri­bu­tions to edited volumes are wide­spread, a practice that approaches some­thing closer to “col­lab­o­rative research,” it is the rare edited volume, indeed, that actually puts the voices of its various authors in dia­logue in an ongoing or extended fashion prior to pub­li­cation, rather than merely through jux­ta­po­sition in a single, con­tained text. In these venues, ulti­mately, most authors are respon­sible for their own indi­vidual con­tri­bu­tions. Ulti­mately, col­lab­o­ration is “per­ceived as high-risk, low reward” ^[3]. Despite the rad­i­cally changing land­scape of the human­ities job market—the MLA Job Infor­mation List, 2017–18: Final Report states that nearly a third of the pre-crash number of tenure-track jobs in “Lan­guages Other than English” were adver­tised through the JIL in 2017–18 (334 com­pared to 906)—we con­tinue to emphasize these tra­di­tional modes of pub­li­cation as paving the path to success ^[4].

This is not to say that col­lab­o­ration does not happen; cer­tainly there are notable excep­tions to this pattern. Indeed, Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies his­tor­i­cally have been built on a number of critical col­lab­o­rative efforts—famously, Pere­grine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Cor­rupting Sea, Kinoshita and Brian Catlos’s col­lab­o­rative efforts, Michelle Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández’s 2014 edited volume, and, more recently, David Wacks’s Open Iberia/América Teaching Anthology, to name just a few. In a sense, then, I am preaching to the choir here. These col­lab­o­rative projects and col­lec­tions have laid the groundwork for the logical next step in our inter­dis­ci­plinary field. Nev­er­theless, all of these scholars cut their teeth on pub­lishing single-author mono­graphs. And, such col­lab­o­ration, whether in the form of edited volumes, co-authored papers, or, very rarely, co-authored books, is not the work that tends to get junior scholars stable jobs or tenure. We are socialized from the beginning of our careers, then, into thinking that the most valuable work we can do is that we do alone, not what we can produce by working in a collective.

This is a model that nec­es­sarily limits the scope of research any one scholar pro­duces and places unnec­essary and self-imposed lim­i­ta­tions on our ability as a set of inter­dis­ci­plinary fields to produce inno­v­ative research. In other aca­demic dis­ci­plines and pro­fes­sional arenas, by and large, the accepted model of work is collaborative—we see this in the sci­ences and some of the more quan­ti­tative social sci­ences in multi-author papers that bring the local expertise of dif­ferent sci­en­tists to bear on a question at the inter­stices of their work. In these con­texts, mono­graphs are the more unusual pub­li­ca­tions and scholars are pri­marily eval­uated on and rewarded for the success of their work in col­lective groups. Postdocs, jobs, and career advancement are pred­i­cated on whether a scholar suc­cess­fully manages and directs bigger projects and demon­strates the inter­per­sonal skills and intel­lectual vision needed to carry such large projects to fruition. Extensive, team-based col­lab­o­ration on article- or book-length projects, broadly prac­ticed in the sci­ences and social sci­ences, is under­uti­lized in the human­ities. I would argue that inter­dis­ci­plinary fields like Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies stand the most to gain from such practices.

While human­ities col­lab­o­ration most com­monly appears in the digital human­ities, ini­tia­tives like Human­ities Without Walls funded by the Andrew Mellon Foun­dation have pro­moted col­lab­o­rative efforts among scholars from dif­ferent fields and dif­ferent insti­tu­tions to address issues like climate change, political and cul­tural divides, or the ethics of tech­nology. On a global level, some pro­po­nents of dif­ferent modes of col­lab­o­rative research argue that it improves indi­vidual col­lab­o­rators’ research process, writings skills, col­le­giality, and ten­dency to meet dead­lines, with knock-on effects for areas beyond the imme­diate research project. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson argue that their expe­rience working col­lab­o­ra­tively effec­tively proved to increase “the his­torical span of […] expertise by delving more deeply into the periods in which [each] had spe­cialized during doc­toral studies” ^[5]. They also expound the ben­efits of working within and applying dif­ferent inter­pretive frame­works to the lit­erary texts they jointly research. These and other ben­efits must surely only be com­pounded in inter­dis­ci­plinary fields like Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies, in which cross-cultural knowledge, com­pe­tency in mul­tiple lan­guages, and other skill sets and knowledge bases are the sine qua non of analysis.

If we con­sider the demands placed on indi­vidual faculty members by the alarming stag­nation in the job market across the North American academy, espe­cially the human­ities, ulti­mately this problem boils down to the problem Chad Leahy so cogently iden­tified in his talk: time. As he noted fol­lowing Fou­cault, “the act of carving up time is fun­da­men­tally an exercise of power.” ^[6] At a time when uni­ver­sities con­tinue to aggres­sively cut budgets and combine human­ities depart­ments into umbrella struc­tures that ask fewer faculty members to cover more ground, we must begin to push back using sol­i­darity not only within aca­demic gov­er­nance struc­tures, but also by over­turning tired research models. Working together in deeply mean­ingful ways on shared intel­lectual projects responds to our human needs for connection—an ever-more-challenging prospect in these months of social isolation—and also, more prag­mat­i­cally, builds the roots of col­lab­o­ration and sol­i­darity that we need to organize against the insti­tu­tional struc­tures that exploit us and our stu­dents. We need to take back our time and use the time that we have to build up new and more just systems of knowledge and education.

Given the above con­di­tions of the aca­demic reality we research and teach in, extensive col­lab­o­ration is the most obvious way to produce inno­v­ative research in a field that is at times struc­turally rel­e­gated to the insti­tu­tional margins and that has defined itself as thriving in those inter­stitial places ^[7]. If much of our training and teaching con­tinue to be orga­nized along national bound­aries of geog­raphy, lan­guage, and culture, then the answers to our inter­dis­ci­plinary ques­tions must lie between us and among us. What I’d like to ask this audience to con­sider going forward is:

• What new forms col­lab­o­rative research in Iberian and Mediter­ranean studies might take?
• How might senior faculty help change existing struc­tures to reward, rather than penalize, junior scholars’ col­lab­o­rative work in the field? How might tenure letters be rewritten to applaud such efforts, rather than dismiss them as less rig­orous than single author monographs?
• What alter­native modes of pub­li­cation might emerge from more intensive col­lab­o­rative efforts? How might, as Rachel Stein pro­posed, open access pub­lishing efforts better support and make these research modal­ities more accessible?
• Why has Iberian studies left the Mediter­ranean out? ^[8]
• How are we going to “do” Mediter­ranean studies? How do you get people together? How do you marshal resources on your campus? How do you get the momentum going? ^[9]

I would like to think that were we as a field to try to start untan­gling some of the struc­tural binds and dis­in­cen­tives against col­lab­o­rative work, this would be fruitful not only for the expansion of Mediter­ranean studies intel­lec­tually, but could also open us up to greater insti­tu­tional flex­i­bility as a field and as scholars to better advocate for our­selves in this crisis in the humanities.