In recent years, various cross-disciplinary research fields have been flourishing in the humanities, transgressing disciplinary boundaries in their scholarly interests and practice. This development, to a large extent, has impacted the scope of interdisciplinarity, transforming it from a rather marginal realm into an everyday practice of research centers and study programs. Heritage and Memory Studies, Human-Animal Studies, Performance Studies or Material Culture Studies, to name just a few, are telling examples of the turn towards interdisciplinary research that the humanities have been undergoing.
Standing for circulation, transfer and the merging of ideas, they promise to yield a dialogue between scholars, inspire new findings, and as a result, foster a new and better understanding of social, cultural and historical phenomena. Taking into account the vast variety of research fields, interdisciplinarity seems to have evolved from a trendy catch phrase and a standard buzz word in grant applications (often perceived of by sceptics as mere lip-service which causes more conceptual and practical problems than it solves), to an established research practice.
With their interdisciplinary cores, these new fields necessarily borrow from various theoretical and methodological backgrounds and disciplines bringing them into dialogue and transforming them into their very own research and teaching agendas, settings, approaches and practices. We would like to take this current state of the humanities as a starting point for reflecting upon the ways in which history and historical inquiry is being understood, carried out, and theorized in interdisciplinary research fields.