Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries

Like many of the historical approaches allied with connected history, the ERC-funded BeInf project is committed to challenging the disciplinary boundaries that have dominated the field of humanities. It does so in several ways. The first is that BeInf adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together methods traditionally categorized as distinct and disconnected, from philology to art history and from linguistics to history. BeInf has been designed on the principle that art historians studying manuscript illuminations improve their work by incorporating details from the surrounding texts, and that in turn philologists focused only on texts miss a crucial part of the story when not considering that these texts are transmitted in particular physical objects, whether manuscripts, inscriptions, etc. Similarly, linguists who eschew the speakers of a language and their historical context irreparably – and unnecessarily – limit the scope of their work and thus the potential of their results, while at the same time historians can garner an additional source of evidence by availing themselves of data provided by linguistics. By adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, BeInf aims to provide a more nuanced and textured account of the connected histories of Ethiopic and Syriac Christianity. A second way in which BeInf challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries is by rejecting area studies. Many fields that study the ancient world continue to be isolated and siloed in problematic ways, which often reflect their origins and their development but which make little sense when viewed critically anew. The field of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies is no exception. Fortunately, the seismic shifts that are presently affecting academia, and the humanities in particular, challenge the isolationist tendencies of many fields. In Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, the results of such changes can be seen in the increasing number of recent publications that draw connections between the Horn of Africa and medieval Europe. This body of research opens an entirely new point of inquiry, which is not only intrinsically interesting in its own right but is crucial for destabilizing the traditional Eurocentric focus of the field of Medieval Studies. As important as this new body of research is, however, the more immediate geographic, cultural, and historical context of Ethiopia and Eritrea should not continue to be neglected. It is this more-immediate context on which BeInf focuses in exploring the connected histories of Ethiopic and Syriac Christianity. In doing so, BeInf further destabilizes the Eurocentric focus of the humanities, marking a third way in which BeInf challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries. In addition to the humanities more broadly, the field of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies particularly stands to benefit from these challenges to traditional disciplinary boundaries that have relegated Ethiopia and Eritrea to the margins for far too long.