Beyond disciplinarity: Humanities and supercomplexity

Abstract

The 'New Humanities' has called for new ways of engaging with Humanities texts; the European Science Foundation is just one major research funder to demand that the Humanities contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations. Meanwhile, traditionally trained disciplinary academics have resisted bringing traditional texts into interdisciplinary courses as 'dumbing down the curriculum'. This article analyses briefly the different epistemological, narratological and disciplinary genres in one text: Herodotus' Histories or Enquiries. It concludes that Humanities study must include such texts, not only as disciplinary but also as supra-disciplinary exemplary ways of knowing. It sketches a New Humanities curriculum based on such a text that could fit the twenty-first century student to live in a super-complex, multi-paradigmatic and radically interdisciplinary world.