neously: “If you can reach people outside your field, you’re interdis-
ciplinary... A proposal that is able to speak across disciplinary idi-
oms to a majority of people on the panel is going to be a suitable
proposal.” The best interdisciplinary proposals are also integrative,
that is, they bring together ideas and approaches from different dis-
ciplines.^13 Thus, unsurprisingly, among the pitfalls and drawbacks
that respondents identify, a primary concern is overreaching or over-
ambitiousness. As an English professor points out, “Projects that
have a lot of ambition to reach beyond the person’s initial field;
they’re risky. The person might not be able to do what they want to
do. Over-ambitiousness was what was both attractive and fatal for
some of the projects.” A historian couples superficiality with over-
reach, maintaining that “if you are interdisciplinary, the burden is
upon you, the candidate, to be aware of that discipline and not do
shoddy work.” This same panelist offers the following telling com-
parison of two applicants from literary studies, each of whom pro-
posed to use a historical approach:
She did what he failed to do. She’s not an historian, but she didn’t
get the history wrong, and she grounded [the proposal] correctly
in context. And I could see how the work would contribute to this
sort of interdisciplinary approach where she’s trying to look at
this literature historically within that context. The few literature
proposals that I’ve gotten have just been very bad for the very rea-
sons that I’m describing—they’re all over the map. They have no
real grounding in context. They bandy theory that isn’t well inte-
grated.I...rankedthemquiteharshly.Flashiness, too, is often associated with overreach. Another histo-
rian, contrasting flashy and real interdisciplinarity, says of flashiness:
Thereisa...wayofdoingthings in which you use your knowl-
edge of the other things, the things outside your discipline, moreConsidering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 207