Aloha,

>On 4/24/2007 at 10:42 AM Sabina Magliocco wrote:

>A better option for those who are interested is to work within an
>established discipline such as anthropology, classics or history, under
>the guidance of a scholar who has worked in the desired area.  

This is more or less the guidance I would offer to anybody interested in 
doing a dissertation focused on some topic of magic or occultism--find a
department/discipline that permits it and, probably most importantly, 
a professor or small group of them that's interested in the proposed 
research, at least a little bit. 

Going a bit farther in offering guidance, I'd say that, in these times,
it's
probably better for a PhD candidate to gain--and to lay claim to--the
broadest understanding of and competence in a given academic discipline. 
Rather than a narrow understanding of an particular sub-discipline, 
even though dissertations are usually about the details. 

*Interdisciplinary* is, I think, and intriguing notion in the academic
realm. 
Intellectually, it's challenging and often fruitful. Interdisciplinary
outlooks 
may lead to interesting and creative insights, or down blind alleys. They
may cause friction within a specific discipline, perhaps because they can 
scrape against received views within the discipline. Or simply because 
they can go beyond the accepted *boundaries* of that discipline. 

One thing that I discovered in taking an interdisciplinary approach to 
higher education was that, many times, I had to educate professors of 
one discipline about subjects from other disciplines. That can get tricksy.

Maybe cybernetics bores them to tears. Maybe they don't want to know
about the standard model of elementary particles or gerbil rearing. 

Another was that It helped me keep my ears and eyes open when, let's 
say, agricultural economists talked about the good old days of organizing
farm co-ops in the American Mid-West, even though I had no ostensible 
academic interest in such things. Later, though, stuff like this may be
just what you need to get at something interesting.

On occasion, there may be some instrumental advantages to a PhD 
candidate having an *interdisciplinary* advisor group. For one thing, 
it may complicate decision-making just enough to keep the research 
topic from being tossed out because it's seen as *marginal* within
the strict confines of one discipline. (And magic and occultism may look 
pretty marginal.)

Lastly, I'm no a big fan of the creation of *new* departments or sub-
departmental study areas, although I realize that such things are part 
of the money and prestige part of the university. It doesn't seem to me 
that we'll see lots of magical studies programs in the next few years, 
unless somebody decides to throw tons of money that way. 

Musing Ivory Tower Power! Rose,

Pitch