Interdisciplinarity in World History: Continuity and Change

Abstract

This book represents selected papers of an international conference convened by the Department of Humanities at Qatar University, Doha, in March 2013. Its theme was “Interdisciplinarity in History: An Old Method in New World Context”. Twelve out of the fifty papers presented at the conference have been thoroughly reviewed, revised and compiled in this volume. Their contributions emphasize that interdisciplinary in history has become a key term for professional historians who reject the professional identity of history based on its claimed autonomy and the distinctiveness of its research methods, and argue that this claim has seriously narrowed the intellectual horizons of the discipline in terms of both teaching and research. The chapters also stress that historical research should not be confined to political events as it was by ancient historians, but, rather, be open to other complex issues which require thorough investigation and collaboration between history and other disciplines. In this sense, interdisciplinarity in history is a process of answering questions, solving problems, or examining topics that are too broad or multifaceted to be tackled adequately by history as a discipline on its own. Therefore, history “should not be regarded as a stationary subject,” as Robinson wrote, but as a discipline that would transcend the limitations formerly imposed upon the study of the past, and integrate with other social science disciplines to widen its methodological scope and investigate many issues that had previously ignored or marginalized.