A Chart of Academic Specializations

December 20, 2006

Many divisions within the academy are not immediately evident to the observer.. not everything is as easy as department divisions! The following is an attempt to sketch out the relationships between different kinds of scholarly mentalities.

I am here defining the philologists as experts in technical issues surrounding the interpretation of languages and texts. The archeologist is someone equally immersed in technical issues, but whose concerns are centered on physical evidence of some kind or other. These two are on the bottom of the chart because they are foundational to all other study.. without edited texts and the interpretation of physical evidence no one would have any basis for arguing anything.

In the center of the chart is the period expert.. and this person could also be termed a subject expert. The Ph.D. process pushes the majority of scholars to this zone. Dissertations with titles such as "Catholicism in Spain 1400-1600 AD" are the markers of this scholar. This sort of specialization is also smart given the academic job market.. which is dominated by time periods.. i.e. "we are looking for someone who works on early modern European history." The period expert is able to step up and fill this kind of position.

At the top come two distinct sorts of scholar. There is the synthesizer and the theoretician. The synthesizer is what the period expert will sometimes grow into.. and it is always a pleasure to read the work of a synthesizer because it identifies surprising parallels and weaves them into a whole. The theoretician, by contrast, is a scholar not so interested in a historical "whole" as in plugging individual facts into a useful frame. This frame will be an interpretive tool that informs the way other texts are read.. something not sought by the synthesizer.

I have also tried to show in my chart the continuities of these different scholarly mentalities. These are often surprising.. Philologists and archeologists are split.. each bringing very different priorities to their work and not terribly interested in what the other has. Yet both are comfortable with the period expert, who draws heavily on the detailed work of both. On top of the chart, the synthesizer and the theoretician are rarely comfortable with each other.. bringing a different agenda to their material. Yet both will use the work of the period expert.

It's humorous how scholars often look down on scholars of a different mentality. This is most obvious when it comes to the distant relation between the theoretician and the philogian. But such hostility is ridiculous, because the entire academic project depends on all these levels functioning at the same time. Facts and points of knowledge are continually getting thrown upwards, and if we are to avoid a great mass of indistinguishable information crowding our libraries then we must posit the work of scholars who can digest and pull together all that information. The period expert who writes "Catholicism in Spain from 1400-1600" may think he has said all that needs to be said, but there is surely a need for the synthesizer to come along and write her book The Rise and Fall of Christianity in Europe.

So where do I fall on this chart? I would say that I am a theoretician who works hard at being a period expert. I have always had envy of those lower down the chart.. standing in awe of philologists in particular. By mentality, though, I am someone who sits at the top right of the scholarly chain.