Ivory towers usually do not have bridges to others. Intellectual siloing has been discussed as a problem of American academia for decades. Even with today’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, collegial interaction across disciplines is often woefully limited. Our campus spaces physically embody intellectual estrangement: at my current institution, I typically walk 100 meters or less from my office to the classrooms I’ve been assigned. It is generally considered a misfortune to teach a class in a building that does not also house your office.
In this article, I want to describe an interdisciplinary collaboration that I recently participated in as an inroad to a discussion of more robust interdisciplinary engagement. The project revealed much to me about what we lose when we fail to interact across disciplines. Though I actually jumped into another researcher’s ongoing, long-term research agenda, from my perspective, the collaboration was completely unexpected.
One afternoon a faculty member stopped by my office. He introduced himself as Niklas Manz, professor of physics. He had stopped by to ask if I could recommend a student to work with him on Russian-language materials. Being new to the institution, I was not aware that student Russian learners and speakers had been working with him for years on a variety of language-based tasks for a project about the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction. Niklas explained that he was writing a history of the reaction, and as part of that project, he was cataloging variations in the naming of the reaction. I suggested that I might be able to contribute some linguistic savvy. Thus began our collaboration.
In summer 2025, working in collaboration with scientists from Moscow and Budapest as well as our own campus, we published an article, “Finding the Eponym for the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction,” in the international journal of chemistry Chaos. The article discusses the history of the reaction’s discovery in the Soviet Union by Boris Belousov and the subsequent research of Anatole Zhabotinsky, among others, and includes a lengthy bibliography of research on the reaction. We catalog variations in the reaction’s naming and attempt to categorize them systematically: what spellings reflect Library of Congress norms? Norms for speakers of French? Individual decisions by native speakers of Russian, German, or Polish writing in English? When might a native speaker of English have recorded a name that they had heard, but not seen in writing, and thus spelled phonetically (BelAusoF, ZhabAtinsky…)? In what cases is the most likely explanation just poor copy editing (ZhaBTinsky)?
The BZ reaction, as it is known in short, is an oscillating non-linear chemical reaction. Experiments, images, and videos of the reaction can be found on the website of the College of Wooster Wave Lab and YouTube. The oscillation is truly mesmerizing – fans of scientific, fractal, or geometric art are sure to be entranced.
When we stated working on the project, Niklas asked a seemingly simple question: why doesn’t everyone just adhere to one standard? It was more understandable that a researcher could use the French norm, or the Soviet GOST transliteration system, or the Library of Congress system, than create ad hoc rules. Here the disciplinary perspective that I offered fell well short of satisfying the scientist’s impulse toward standardization.
Over the course of our collaboration, we discussed many such questions of disciplinary norms, methods, and perspectives. We learned from each other, and for me, one of the most important lessons was just how much we did not know about each other and the fields we represent. In the remainder of this article, I will summarize three ideas that I think are worthy of broad consideration.
I have already gestured toward the first lesson: we, meaning academia at large, have a dangerous problem of believing that we understand about others more than we do. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing (whose phrase is this – Albert Einstein’s or Alexander Pope’s? If only there was a discipline that investigated such things.). We often do not really understand what happens in other disciplines in terms of research, and maybe even less, instruction. We rarely observe classes outside of our own discipline and have only vague conceptions of what type of work students do in those courses: we hear “problem set,” “presentation,” “lab report,” and think we understand, but often have little sense of the specifics.
Second, seemingly disparate fields of knowledge are not, or at least, need not be, as disconnected as we might imagine. It might come as a revelation to some of our colleagues around campus that humanistic scholarship is not a long-form version of an American high school “personal response” essay. Rather, by directly interacting on academic matters, we can see ourselves in each other: that all of us work with systems of knowledge, systems of signs and symbols, attempt to bridge concrete observations and theoretical propositions, and so on. We could think of ourselves as different but overlapping rather than as opposing camps (in the American system, literally “divisions”).
Seemingly disparate fields of knowledge are not, or at least, need not be, as disconnected as we might imagine.
This point has been raised from within the quantitative sciences as well, including, recently, in the book Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior by Melina Packer and Amina Kamath, published in 2025. The thesis of the book is, in essence, that although science claims objectivity and rationality, it unavoidably bears the imprint of the society in which it is created. Insofar as a great deal of science has been created in societies that are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialist, and capitalist, scientific perspectives (here we must admit that this applies to all fields of knowledge, our own included) reflect those biases, leading to a distorted view. Society always leaves its indelible mark, and the authors provide ample examples of how zoology, even in the twenty-first century, continues to apply Victorian-era gender norms to animal life, how eugenics continues to influence how scientists understand natural selection, how social Darwinism has been reflected back onto other animals. In order to overcome these applications of human thought and behavioral systems in zoology – whether by design or not – the authors argue for the incorporation of humanistic and social critical theory into the quantitative sciences. This also means greater attention to such “literary” issues as rhetoric, narrative, and metaphor in scientific thinking and communication – as many readers of this article know, these choices are never natural or neutral.
Returning to our collaboration, it is perhaps unsurprising that another point of debate concerned the social grounding of knowledge vs. its immanence.
The third lesson is that intellectual disagreement is perhaps inevitable, maybe even guaranteed under conditions of estrangement, but also productive of knowledge and generative of new ideas. One of the most important elements of my collaboration with Niklas was not the project itself, but the conversations we had around the project. There were points that we disagreed on, and did or did not reach consensus, as well as points of agreement. On the level of the everyday, too often dismissed as banal (in my view, a vestige of the social class from which the professoriate has historically originated), we got to understand one another’s time commitments, teaching obligations, professional and service labor, and intellectual commitments on a deeper level.
One key issue we debated was about how our project was, or was not, political. For those of us who, like me, view all scholarship, and indeed all knowledge, as inherently political in manifest ways, it is important to recognize that a common view in STEM fields is that knowledge is not only quantifiable, measurable, but also transcendent, and if all of these, then also uncorruptible by political concerns. Working from such a definition, they naturally see humanities and social sciences as “subjectivism” and “opinion.” But history, literature, philosophy, art, and any other human creativity has never taken place in a lab setting under controlled conditions, and it does not follow from this fact that there are not methodologies and ways of knowing them. This is a battle for legitimacy for the humanities and social sciences, and one that I will not describe further because I am sure that it is already in my dear reader’s daily experience.
In response to the claim that our research exists outside of the political sphere, I would quip that the only reason for our project to exist was Cold War politics. For us to work on this project, for me, was also a political concern. But rather than proving that intellectual collaboration is possible even when international relations are tense, I saw our project as more fundamentally dissociating individuals who happen to live and work in one country from their respective political entities. How many of us have stressed to students that not every Russian automatically supports the Putin government by the fact of holding a Russian passport? How many of us would resent the same assumption of support on the basis of where we live or work?
Of course, there also were points of agreement. The most exciting example of this for me was a case of multiple discovery: Niklas and I had independently come up with the same essential idea about how to break out of academic siloing. We believe that academic communities would find greater internal solidarity, that we would practice what we preach about expanding the mind with the pursuit of knowledge, that we model and benefit from lifelong learning, if we regularly audited courses from other departments and divisions. In my grandiose version of the idea, certainly impossible until we win major changes in academic labor at large, auditing a course would be counted as faculty workload, akin to the continuing education and professional development that takes place in other fields. In his version of the idea, Niklas proposed a voluntary, unpaid addition to workload.
We conclude our article in Chaos with an argument for standardization of linguistic practices, in keeping with the broader practice of standardization as a facility for understanding – after all, no twenty-first century scientist measures in poods or cubits, but grams and meters. We acknowledge that this might still be messy: sometimes we will write zh, but also sometimes ż, and the rationale for one or the other will remain concealed from those lacking the requisite linguistic knowledge. Worse still, those who don’t know also might not know what question to ask to get at the answer. Were we to reach a common understanding of knowledge as co-constituted with human experience, we might be better able to handle that messiness.
We also gently suggest that something is lost by the hegemony of English as the linga franca of academic communication. A problem that I sincerely hope scientists will grapple with (and find funding for) is the tremendous volume of research that was published by Soviet multinational researchers that remains inaccessible to Anglophone researchers because of the language divide. One of the most interesting responses to this project that I have received was from another scientist who discovered that their US federal government-funded project was quite similar in design and objectives to a Soviet project of the 1960-70s. “We’ve found their papers and can kind of decode their tables,” they said, “at least enough to know that we’re duplicating their work.” Witness also the Western ‘discovery’ of the biosphere in the early days of its postwar environmental movement, decades after Vladimir Vernadsky had extensively theorized it.
Were we to reach a common understanding of knowledge as co-constituted with human experience, we might be better able to handle that messiness.
In one sense, my story has a sad ending: my time at the institution ended with non-renewal of my contract, as the administration had by then marginalized the Russian program enough to render faculty unneeded. It wouldn’t be fair to expect this collaboration alone to save that program, underfunded, understaffed, and unsupported as it was even in its most halcyon days. But were collaborations like ours to spread, or short of that, were we to talk to our colleagues in other disciplines about what we actually do, and what they actually do, and how we are all related in ways beyond mission statements, committee service, and perfunctory votes at faculty meetings, higher ed might come closer to the model of the liberal arts in the classic sense that some of us still believe in: that specialization is well and good, but broad knowledge, the ability to compare perspectives, and access to a range of ways of thinking is a positive for academic researchers, students, and human beings (like college graduates) in general.
We in the humanities and social sciences often like to think of ourselves as in the vanguard of issues like decolonization, amplifying the voices of the dispossessed, and giving due attention to marginalized knowledge traditions. A central feature of many indigenous knowledge systems is the interrelatedness of all with all. If we can genuinely make this insight a part of our practice, not only as educators and researchers, but as academic laborers, then perhaps we can work in concert and solidarity across disciplines.
Zach Rewinski (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2021) is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Colby College. His research interests lie mainly on the intersection of literary culture with social and political history in times of revolutionary upheaval. Himself a product of a diverse liberal arts education (BA, Oberlin College, 2010), Zach advocates for holistic, multi- and interdisciplinary ways of thinking and knowing.
