To better envisage what European studies entails as a field of inquiry, it is useful to delve into the history of area studies and more generally into the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been advocated for and practiced. Buzzword? Field in its own right? Practice? Method? Genre? Discourse? Institutional framework? Subdiscipline? Ideology? Paradigm? Metaphor? Often considered an elusive and undertheorized pedagogy until a few decades ago, today interdisciplinarity has come to feature at the forefront of scholarly endeavors as grantors have increasingly encouraged collaborative projects. Many “area studies” emerged in the post-World War II era, but did not gather full momentum until the 1960s and 1970s when researchers started looking for alternative structures to organize knowledge and knowledge production to create participatory spaces of increased diversity within the university, with a focus on developing social capital as well as bridging the university with society.

To understand the draw toward interdisciplinarity, the latter must be replaced in the context of the compartmentalizing of the academe and disciplinary epistemological commitments that had existed for centuries. An examination of interdisciplinarity also brings the challenging responsibility of defining it. Theorists generally agree about what it is not. Rather than “pluri” or “multi” disciplinarity, which signifies a juxtaposition of the disciplines, “inter” disciplinarity developed into a critical tool to investigate scholarly expertise and offer new knowledge brought about through encounters between various disciplines. The disciplines have emerged over centuries, producing their specific methodologies, objects of studies, scopes, analytical lenses, and values. Likewise, interdisciplinarity produces specific types of knowledge, methods, and scholarly cultures, yielding collaborative networks and communities of practice that rely on social over economic capital. “Studies” can defragment the university, debalkanize departments, and are unbounded, offering needed alternative models and structures to solve complex contemporary problems.

European studies, as a discipline, developed out of the ruins of Western civilization. In the protests of the late 1960s, Western civilization courses largely fell out of fashion because of their often-explicit Eurocentrism – there was a whole world outside of Europe that had largely been ignored.