In my current position, I share office space with a number of other people, a bullpen setup not unlike that I had early in my time as a graduate teaching assistant. One of the benefits of such an arrangement is the openness of interchange it facilitates; everybody in the room is engaged in a similar enterprise, if with differences in focus, and the ability to easily bounce ideas off of one another leads to the development of yet other concepts that inform better teaching and research. I, as a medievalist, can recommend approaches that another, a Shakespearean, would not have considered, and the Shakespearean can do the same for me.
Such a thing happened to me today. I will not go into the details, as that would make it more difficult for both of us, but a colleague and I were batting around ideas about classroom practice and books old and new, and we both stumbled onto ideas for what might be excellent papers. Finding out whether or not the ideas will work will take some doing, of course, looking first to see if others have already pursued the ideas we have, and then looking to see if we can draw the connections among texts that would allow us to make our intended declarations about the cultures that have been at work in the English-speaking world, thereby adding to the knowledge from which we can base yet other ideas about how the English-speaking world changes as time passes.
Having access to the kind of interchange that leads to fruitful discussion and potential avenues for the expansion of the field of human knowledge is not limited to academia, of course. I have had many excellent talks with coworkers in many of the jobs I have held outside of schooling, and I have had many others with random people at bars and on trains. But the scholarly world focuses attention on such things to a remarkable degree, and it affords access to a number of resources that are of great help in carrying it out.
I am glad to be part of it.
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