DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Geraldo Cadava: Thank you Melissa for talking to me about chairing Asian Languages and Cultures. Can you tell us where are you in your three-year deployment?

Melissa Macauley: Well, I'm just ending my second academic year as Chair, so I'm almost two thirds of the way done. Last year, I was deer in headlights, not really sure how to run this program because it's very different from History.

This year, I'm more settled in, although we had to reappoint or promote six teaching track faculty, which was just exhausting, I have to say. So, next year I'll really know what I'm doing. And then of course, once you really know your job, someone else steps in. That's always the fate of people in these positions.

I’ve played many roles in the history department—Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies. But I’ve never chaired the history department. I was, however, the founding director of Asian American Studies. That was a trip.

Geraldo Cadava: You were the first director of Asian American Studies? I didn’t know that. This is kind of your second rodeo as the leader of an interdisciplinary unit, then. So, what is your take on why historians have been tasked so often with chairing or directing interdisciplinary units?

Melissa Macauley: I think part of it is the nature of our discipline. I mean, methodologically, we're pretty liberal, you know? There isn't a single method. You could teach a methods course in history, but it's not as though, unless you do social history, there's something wrong with you or something. The approaches to studying history are varied and so we exist at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences.

And, so, I think we can slip into a humanities course with some background in humanities, or into a social sciences course with some background in the social sciences. Also, many interdisciplinary programs are area studies programs, so it does require some appreciation for many different parts of the world as well. So, I think methodologically and just the way the discipline's oriented, you end up with a pretty good repertoire.

Geraldo Cadava: Yeah. I know from having directed Latino Studies and American Studies that often the job is just administration and it doesn't really matter what my disciplinary training is. It's just signing forms or whatever. But would you say that there have been occasions when your skills or training as a historian have been useful to you as the leader of an interdisciplinary unit?

Melissa Macauley: It's funny because, me being in a historian sometimes feels like baggage because I have to prevent myself from saying, well, in history, we, yes, yes. I remember certain people coming from Ivy League universities and saying, well, at Princeton we …

So, you know, it does involve thinking about a department in a different way. I mean, Asian Languages and Cultures is a very different department from history. But coming from a department that has its act together, you come in with this idea that if there's a problem, I can help solve it.

But disciplinarily, I think the other scholars in the department are committed to their own approaches to how they study Korea or Chinese literature, for example. I participate in those conversations, and of course I participate primarily as a historian. And so, it becomes more of a conversation about Chinese culture, Japanese culture, transregional studies. Also, scholars in my field usually separate East Asian Studies from South Asian Studies. But, at Northwestern we combine the two, and that's perfect for me because I do that kind of history now. I'm primarily a China specialist, but I'm really interested in diaspora, migration, and colonial encounters. That makes me more interested in hearing about India, for example. It's like, right, Indians are in Singapore too. Oh, I need to think about that a lot more. So, in some ways, I don't know if I'm contributing to conversations as an historian. I think I'm just contributing to conversations about Asia in some ways.

Geraldo Cadava: On the point of how you're interested in immigration, refugees, colonialism, and etc, and now, through Asian Languages and Cultures, you’re exposed to scholars in other disciplines working on those topics, have you gained insights from them that you then bring back to your work as a historian or as a teacher of history classes?

Melissa Macauley: You know, it's so funny because the training you get in East Asian History is already so interdisciplinary. I mean, it may be similar in American history and I just haven't noticed it that much, but I had a grant at Berkeley that required me to take Chinese Literature; even though I had passed all of my exams in modern and classical Chinese, I still had to take literature courses because it was this Foreign Language Area Studies grant.

So, I was taking a lot of courses on popular literature, which made it easy to understand certain aspects of Chinese culture. It was great because it forced me to take more courses because had to do it to get this money.

Then, of course, you're in a Chinese studies program where you have a lot of people who are interested in contemporary China, political science in particular, but also anthropology and so on, and your training on China is in history. So, what do you bring to this kind of program? It’s this ability to go to a seminar or workshop on Chinese politics, literature, or art, and still follow it. So, I'm able to operate in that world because I was trained in it, you know? I had to take those literature courses whether I wanted to or not.

Geraldo Cadava: When I'm interacting with colleagues in other fields in these settings, I feel like—and I don't know if this is just my own hangup or if it’s how colleagues in other fields see me—there's this idea that we are the conservative disciplinarians in interdisciplinary settings because we're so bound to dates and events and change over time and causality. I don't know that our colleagues think as linearly. For all these reasons, I think we're often seen as conservative. Do you feel that in Asian Languages and Cultures?

Melissa Macauley: It's so funny, I can't remember his name now, he was in the Slavic department—he went on to be president of like the University of Kazakhstan or something—but oh my God, he referred to history as the last empirical discipline in the humanities. And it's true. I mean, the thing is, it's evidence, you know. Evidence is important, like proofs are important, as Aristotle wrote.

Many years ago, I was a fellow at Harvard’s Bunting Institute. Now it’s called the Radcliffe Institute. That's a very interdisciplinary group. A historian of the United States was presenting on something and she was saying that she couldn't find evidence for some assertion that she was sure was true, so she was still looking and that was what was engaging her at the time. And this literary person just looked at her and said, well, why don't you just make it up?

Geraldo Cadava: No!!!

Melissa Macauley: I remember feeling so shocked and almost disgusted in a way, but I'm looking at the historian’s face and thinking, oh my God, our face is the same. It's as if this woman were about to stomp on a baby's face or something. It was just so unacceptable. So, yeah, I think we're really evidence bound and I think that's kind of what saved the discipline of history when the whole academy went through the cultural turn in the eighties and nineties: we knew what we were committed to.

Geraldo Cadava: Right. And it is interesting the ways in which history hangs together because of our beliefs and evidence, despite what you called the liberalism of our discipline; the fact that some of us look at culture, some of us look at politics. We all have that common ground of carefully weighing evidence.

Last question. Before I hit record, you said that there has been a long, well, history of historians leading interdisciplinary units. From what you can reconstruct on the spot, can you tell me a little bit about that history?

Melissa Macauley: I noticed it because it was so common. Brodie Fisher headed Latin American Studies before she left Northwestern. Joe Barton ran Chicago Field Studies. Henry Benford ran American Studies—a lot of the Americanists have run American studies. I think both Helen Tilly and Ken Alder and Paul Ramirez have run the Science and Human Culture program. Peter Hayes chaired German. As I said, I was the founding director of Asian American Studies, but also now I'm chairing Asian Languages and Cultures. And so on and so forth. I think it’s because of the way we're trained, which is to say that we’re good empiricists, and we have to speak other languages.

We’re also moderating forces. We know how to sift through and evaluate sources. So, you know, we have some of these talents that are kind of necessary, even if the people who are teaching Chinese are native speakers of Chinese. You have that kind of talent that works outside of the history department, but also this sort of open-mindedness about studies of the human condition. We can walk into a room of scholars in other disciplines and say, “I'm really interested in what you're saying about this novel.” Yeah, there's an open-mindedness and moderation that historians carry with them from discipline to discipline.

Geraldo Cadava: I love that. And I'm sure that it is a headache every year for our department chair and associate chair to figure out how they're going to fill the holes in the curriculum left by us going to lead other units. But I hope that it's generally enriching for us and, therefore, for the department as well; there must be ways in which the history department benefits, too.

Melissa Macauley: Maybe. I think you don't just lose the courses. You lose the warm bodies for staffing committees.

Geraldo Cadava: I don't know about you, but this is my last year directing American Studies and then I will be fully back in history. And whenever I'm at the end of these three-year stints, I am so excited to get back into history and like come to our department meetings and work with our colleagues and recommit to history in a lot of ways. Do you have that feeling too?

Melissa Macauley: Well, it is funny because my identity is as a historian. I mean, I love what I do in Asian Languages and Cultures. I really want the department to thrive, and they’ve made great strides. But I also feel like I've been cast aside—or, not cast aside, but adrift in some ways. I would like to just sit back and listen to someone talk about Leopold van Ranke again.

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