The Grey Areas: Interdisciplinarity, Memory, and the Amateur’s Perspective

This article reflects on eleven years leading the University of Birmingham’s Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences unit, examining how we might continue to educate undergraduates in genuine interdisciplinarity when the very concept remains contested and unstable. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of historical consciousness and the ‘weak messianic power’ of the past, I argue that interdisciplinary education succeeds not through mastery but through what I call the amateur’s advantage—the willingness to stand as a curious outsider across multiple domains. As a Classicist and literary scholar by training, I trace how leading programmes that bridged arts and sciences transformed my own scholarly identity, revealing interdisciplinarity not as a fixed pedagogical method but as a disposition towards knowledge itself. The suspension of our successor BASc programme in 2025 prompts reflection on what interdisciplinary education can and cannot achieve within institutions organised around disciplinary structures, and on the fragility of educational experiments that demand students and staff alike inhabit uncomfortable grey areas where established canons, questions, and methods no longer suffice.