Abstract
This dissertation traces how several twenty-first-century campus genres depict tensions between academic disciplines at a time when interdisciplinary research has emerged as one of higher education’s go-to solutions for addressing complex issues. Through close readings of poetry, film, novels, fictional case studies, and a pedagogical role-playing game all published within the past decade, I show how these forms illuminate disciplinary divides, making visible the ongoing collisions between scientific and humanistic ways of knowing. My two-pronged analysis—first examining human/animal relationships on campus, then exploring universities’ social justice rhetoric—reveals how these forms then model alternative disciplinary relationships. Rather than treating interdisciplinarity as just a hotbed of future innovation, I argue these forms reframe interdisciplinarity as a critical tool for addressing institutional harms—one that is most compelling when it encourages connections between disciplines that are generative rather than extractive.
Committee Chair
Anca Parvulescu
Committee Members
J. Dillon Brown; Melanie Micir; Niki Herd; William Maxwell
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English & American Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
4-27-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/kwe4-6210
Author's ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0908-3124
Recommended Citation
Evers, Laura, "University Experiments: Interdisciplinarity in Contemporary American Campus Forms" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3800.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/kwe4-6210