Professor Ato Quayson
Stanford University
Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation: Concepts, Boundaries, and Contradiction
September 10, 18:00 – 19:30, CEU Auditorium
Wine and cheese reception to follow
At the core of the efforts at interdisciplinarity are two central principles, first, that of integrative epistemologies that might be applicable to all fields of learning, including the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The second is unified or collaborative modes of knowledge that might be deployed for addressing real-world problems, such as environmental degradation, increasingly complex cities, water shortage and its management, public health crises, migration and refugees, international security, and the vagaries of globalization, to name just a few that have captured headlines since the Covid pandemic. I will be arguing, however, that when we claim to be doing interdisciplinary work that we must specify as clearly as possible what kinds of concepts, methods, and propositional protocols we are carrying over from another discipline or disciplines and what this does to our configuration of interdisciplinarity. Thus, to be truly interdisciplinary one must be able demonstrate conversance with the protocols of proposition-making in all the disciplines within the interdisciplinary mix. The question of protocols of proposition-making raises serious questions about how scholars purporting to be interdisciplinary are trained, which also means a conscious self-awareness of the limits of their own primary disciplines and a humility in learning properly and not just as is convenient from the rigorous protocols of other disciplines. I shall demonstrate the various dimensions and implications of the applications of protocols of proposition making from my own work, and with reference to the work of others in the humanities and social sciences, such as Hayden White, Christopher Norris, Gillian Beer, Edward Said, Karen Barad, and various others.
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English, and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. He holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Ghana, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he also taught at the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He has held professorships at the University of Toronto (2005-2017), NYU (2017-2019), and Stanford (2019--).
Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 10 edited volumes, including Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014) which was co-winner of the Urban History Association's 2015 Best Book Prize (non-North America) and was named in The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. His most recent book is Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), winner of the Warren-Brooks Prize in Literary Criticism for 2022. The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (with Jini Kim Watson), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (with Ankhi Mukherjee) were both published with CUP in 2023. He is currently working on Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation for CUP and on Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra (with Grace Toleque) for Chicago UP/Intellect Press.
Professor Quayson curates Critic.Reading.Writing, a YouTube channel on which he discusses various topics in literature, urban studies and the humanities in general:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjoidh_R_bJCnXyKBkytP_g and is also the host of Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour (https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/literature/contours-the-cambridge-literary-studies-hour), where he holds dialogues with various scholars to address pressing issues, themes, and concepts in 21st century literary studies from medieval literature to the present day and from all areas of global literary studies from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
Professor Quayson has served as President of the African Studies Association (2019-2020) and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), the Royal Society of Canada (2013), the British Academy (2019), and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023).
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