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Professional Victorianisms: Immediacy, Urgency, and Interdisciplinarity in/at Work

Inspired by the theme of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2016 conference “Natural and Unnatural Histories,” V21 Collective members hosted a roundtable discussion on “strategic presentism.” The collective, which later published its interventions in the August 2016 issue of the journal Victorian Studies, uses the term “strategic” to recuperate “presentism” from its negative valences, to revitalize what they have implied is the stagnating field of nineteenth-century studies. Moreover, as the panel’s subtitle, “21st-Century Urgencies of 19th-Century Study,” provocatively suggested, we need a “strategic presentism” today. As the collective wrote in Victorian Studies, this means “asking how presentism might help us better understand and address the ways the past is at work in the exigencies of the present, from the recursive afterlives of British imperialism in our own era of war to the long arc of ongoing processes of dispossession under capitalism” (Coombs and Coriale 88). It might also show the potential of nineteenth-century studies to “critique current problems,” including the tendency of higher education administrators to figure the “value” of the field in economic and organizational needs rather than in intellectual concerns (as Nathan K. Hensley noted during the roundtable’s Q&A). The roundtable thus became an occasion to acknowledge and discuss what often lies beneath the surface of our conferences: namely, the intersection between our scholarship and the day-to-day exigencies of our jobs. V21 asked how nineteenth-century studies and we, as scholars of the field, might be positioned to respond overtly, obviously, and immediately to the complex set of phenomena often referred to as the crisis in higher education. The following contributions continue the conversation started by INCS and V21 about academic labor and the “urgencies” of nineteenth-century study. Each of the four essays invokes interdisciplinarity not only within our objects of study but also within the contemporary politics and institutional structures of our field and the wider state of higher education. Crucially, they broaden the conversation by including “views from the ground” that were not represented at the roundtable: the voices of a contingent faculty member, a dean from a regional public university, a lecturer occupying a renewable administrative-teaching role, and an assistant professor from a small, teaching-oriented institution.