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Imagine it: PhD candidates across disciplines working and learning together, breaking common – and uncommon – ground and growing strong in their ministries. For the first time, Princeton Theological Seminary is offering incoming doctoral students an interdisciplinary course designed to make their entry onto campus easier and strengthen their formation. The first-semester course is an initiative that emerged from a faculty task force reviewing the PhD program in 2021-2022, says Dr. Heath W. Carter, Associate Professor of American Christianity and Director of PhD Studies. “One of the things that we thought would improve the experience for our students, their formation and their training as scholars and thinkers and writers was to have them engaging in community, in a common intellectual conversation.” Dr. Carter, a historian, and Dr. Elaine T. James, Associate Professor of Old Testament, formed an interdisciplinary co-teaching team of their own to lead the cohort of 10 candidates into a new way of navigating the crossings between their various disciplines. “We have people studying the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, theology, ethics, and politics. They are studying every period of the history of Christianity, from Jesus to the present day. We have people doing practical theology, pastoral counseling, homiletics, and Christian education. And then we have an interdisciplinary program in religion and society, where people are doing work that’s anthropological or sociological or ethnographic, or maybe historical or theological, or a mix of all those things,” Carter says. So, Dr. Carter and Dr. James crafted a course where students get to know each other and work hard together. The goal, he says, is to understand that there is “something that we’re all doing in common, even as we’re all doing very different kinds of intellectual work.” The class actively explores how to cross boundaries – for theologians to read history books, for historians to read the Bible, and for everyone to learn about the practice of pastoral counseling. “One productive challenge of this course was communicating clearly across disciplinary boundaries,” says Dr. James. “This is a great skill for anyone to have, and it is an especially good challenge for PhD students who are deepening their knowledge to contribute to a particular discipline. It’s tempting to fall into discipline-specific jargon! Practicing communicating clearly across disciplinary lines is essential for good academic writing and for sharing knowledge in general.” The course, which will resume next fall, will be led each year by the Director of PhD Studies and a second faculty member from a different discipline. In the first year, each week, a student was asked to select a text for everyone to read and to produce a five-page essay for the next class. A second student was assigned or volunteered to react to the text and essay. “So, every week, there were two students who were helping to lead the conversation. And that meant students became deeply invested week after week,” Dr. Carter says. “And they began to think in an interdisciplinary way. Then you have a room full of people doing very different kinds of work who are creating a common conversation together.” The class goes further than just academics. The group focused on real-life issues. “We talked about how to write for graduate school and how to develop a writing practice, which is part of why every week, everybody wrote at least something,” Dr. Carter says.
At the end of every week, we’d put a spotlight on an issue in professional life as an academic, like: How do you approach conference presentations? How do you develop a daily writing practice? How do you deal with imposter syndrome? How do you deal with all the things that really matter for professional development but that often don’t make it onto a syllabus?
Students gave the class high ratings at the end of its first year. “Students worked hard to think deeply and critically about the readings, which made the classroom a very stimulating environment,” says Claudia Alvarez, a PhD candidate in Religion and Society. “Similarly, the fact that six out of ten students in the cohort are international made it great to reflect on many topics from different national, cultural, and geographical contexts, challenging any parochial views.” Maxine King, who is studying theology, said she learned a lot “from this early engagement with my colleagues’ research methods and content. It helpfully primed us for collaboration throughout our time together at Princeton Seminary.” Dr. James loved the experience. “It was a joy to see students learning from each other with such honest curiosity and finding intellectual connections across their various fields. It was a privilege to learn from my colleague Dr. Carter, to be exposed to so many interesting ideas and texts that I would not otherwise have encountered – and to learn with and from our excellent cohort of students. I hope they had a similarly positive experience.” There’s a bigger issue to consider, she says. “In our cultural moment, the contributions of the Humanities and of the University in general are under a high level of scrutiny or downright threat. Rigorous conversation that crosses disciplinary lines is a gift of the academy; it is also a deep necessity for addressing the needs of the world. “We need to do the important work that the Humanities can do, both critiquing the knowledge we have received, and preserving the best of our traditions. It is a project that gives me great hope.”
Learn more about the PhD program.
