“The most Luddite person you can imagine” is how Anthony T. Grafton describes himself. But it’s in part thanks to Mr. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, that the American Historical Association has finally put digital-humanities scholarship on its agenda.
Mr. Grafton just stepped down as president of the association, after a year of energetic public campaigning to get both the group and the discipline to broaden their horizons.
At the association’s annual meeting, held this past Thursday through Sunday in Chicago, Mr. Grafton appeared to be everywhere, moderating panels and plenaries, delivering a typically engaging and erudite lecture on Francis Daniel Pastorius and “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies,” and praising colleagues’ scholarship and professional contributions as “extraordinary” at every turn.
The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.
“The association only matters insofar as it’s vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things,” he says. “Nobody’s sure the annual meetings have much of a future.” He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, “a place of virtual discussion and dialogue.”
In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend “which really delights my soul.”
Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.
As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.
Such approaches are “not the way we did intellectual history in the past,” he said. “It’s not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it’s informed by it, and it’s in dialogue with it. It’s intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives.”
An edited version of more excerpts from our conversation follows.
Q. When will we see a digital-humanities center like George Mason’s Center for History and New Media at an institution like Princeton?
A. I don’t think there’s an Ivy League institution that has a full-time position for a digital historian. We’re slow. We’ve always done things in our way. Our students have always been able to find jobs. ... We’re not pushed to rethink what we do in graduate education. That means there really is a tendency in the elite private departments to say, “No, our job is to train the best students.” My feeling is it’s five minutes past midnight. We really do need to think about what we do in a different way. ... I’m not hearing skepticism in my department so much as a sort of benign neglect. People are very busy; they have their own methods. What hasn’t happened yet is a clear beachhead [for digital work].
Q. There’s been a lot of emphasis lately on the need for scholars to work together, even in fields like history that have emphasized independent research. Should all historians be thinking collaboratively now?
A. The best collaboration comes when you take some of these lone cowboys and cowgirls and bring them together. ... You should never do anything unless it springs from your own interests. The terrible idea is top-down, everybody has to collaborate.
Q. We heard a lot at this year’s meeting about how history as a discipline used to put more emphasis on public history. Why is it important to recall that?
A. There was a freedom in those days. There was a commitment to the public sphere, there was a commitment to schools. We extruded all that to professionalize, and now we need to find our way back.
Q. Looking back over the past year, what are you proudest of having accomplished during your presidency? What’s left to be done?
A. I’m proudest of all the attention we’re giving to digital humanities in this annual meeting. We’ve really moved an order of magnitude into the digital world. That is a real accomplishment, mostly not mine, except for the [presidential] bully pulpit. ... As for early-career historians and adjuncts, the situation is still dreadful. We still have a huge distance to go.
