Interdisciplinarity across the Humanities Institutional Relationships

1. Interdisciplinarity across the HumanitiesInstitutional Relationships Stuart Taberner (Leeds Humanities Research Institute)

2. The LHRI at Leeds • Set up 5 years ago to promote interdisciplinary research and grant-capture • Run by a Director and the Faculty Research manager, with staff for pre-award and post-award support • Funded by ADF in the first instance, subsequently by ‘poll tax’ on schools (English, History, SMLC, Humanities and IMS • Housed in Victorian terrace, with seminar rooms, co-housed with Graduate School

3. Development • Primary emphasis in earlier years, and to a large extent in the present, on grant-capture • Runs training workshops, provides substantial advice to individuals, does costings, and processes applications • Great deal of success: 161 applications in August 2008 – February 2009 with an external value of £8.62m (and an fEC value of £13.15m) compared with 92 applications in the similar period last year (then worth an external value of £5.53m and an fEC value of £7.79m).

4. Role in the Faculty • To promote grant-capture; requires use of ‘soft power’ and persuasion • Provide management information to schools on grant capture • To provide intelligence on changes in the research grant environment • To encourage coordination between schools and research, particularly at the level of research strategy • To input into Faculty research strategy

5. What gets left behind… • Because of emphasis on grant-capture (importance for budgets, also importance of changing culture), fostering interdisciplinary activity becomes a rather secondary activity • We are trying to address this via: 1. pumppriming; 2. Director’s input into research management of interdisciplinary institutes and groups • However, there are significant institutional obstacles to developing this activity significantly…

6. Obstacles to Interdisciplinary Activity – The Faculty • Organisation of the Faculty – schools with their own workload models and their own budgets • Funding – who should fund interdisciplinary activity which may not benefit any particular school; how should grants awarded interdisciplinary groups be channelled to school budgets? • Structures and incentives – work done ‘outside’ of School may go ‘unnoticed’ and not be rewarded via promotions • Culture – culture rooted in disciplines; many colleagues don’t see their work as interdisciplinary; or as so interdisciplinary that they don’t see need for interdisciplinary structures

7. University Obstacles • Obstacles abound within the Faculty – even more so across the University • PVAC (Performance, Visual and Cultural Industries) – many of our ‘natural’ partners in a different Faculty • Opportunities to meet and work with people in wider University (Medicine, for example, which might appeal to Philosophers in HPS), hampered by problems of scale – Medics looking at multi-million £ opportunities which we find it hard to scale up to • University ‘pass-through’ model compounds problem of ‘School budgets’ – individuals may participate in interdisciplinary groups but their costs, and income, attributed to schools • Culture – University organised into Faculties…

8. Solutions – or, rather, ‘work-arounds’ • Focus on the LHRI as a ‘space’ – i.e. a physical resource where people can meet and develop collaboration • In advising on grant applications, opportunity spotting to bring people together across disciplines • Visiting Research Fellows – promoting applications to grants schemes will bring in visiting fellows, housing them in the LHRI, encouraging colleagues to organise events around them • Developing major strategic themes across the Faculty and beyond, hosted by the LHRI, with pumppriming • Strategic partnerships – Humanities in Copenhagen – which often encourages interdisciplinary research (not least because cognates researchers in different departments there)