ALYSIA GARRISON ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
Your field is 18th-century literature, culture, and history, so what are you working on with the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth? The liberal arts are at the nexus of all interdisciplinary research. The Energy Institute is tapping work across the entire campus from literature to engineering to management in an effort to craft revolutionary solutions. My project reaches back into history to understand evolving ecological perspectives about energy and to track the roots of climate change. Are you saying that the liberal arts are more than Chaucer and Plato? We’re coming off a trend where the prevailing thinking was that only STEM matters. Science, technology, engineering, and math do matter, but not in place of the liberal arts. The liberal arts teach us to think, to evaluate, to reason, and — to paraphrase Immanuel Kant — to build courage to use that reason out in the world.
You are exploring something called secret history. Is that as intriguing as it sounds? I think so. Secret history straddles anecdote and memoir. It’s the retelling of established history, either embellishing it with fictional details or rewriting it with new facts and a new lens. I’m investigating the form because of its enduring popularity in 18th-century — and 21st-century — novels. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver chats with ghosts of famous emperors and philosophers who reveal the counter-history of corruption and scandal that has shaped world events. Secret history is making public what the powerful would just as soon keep private. It has special resonance in our present climate. You must have many favorite books, but say you were stuck in an elevator. Which would you want at hand? Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It’s an experimental novel published in nine volumes in 1759 composed entirely of anecdotes covering a wide range of disciplines. In some sense, a collection of secret histories … and absolutely inexhaustible.
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Reason PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
The argument has always been that STEM is where the jobs are. The reality of a STEM-dominated world has shown us what we’re missing: that the liberal is vocational. A study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities a couple of years ago shows that 95% of employers want to hire people with intellectual and interpersonal skills — and that a job candidate’s major is less important to employers than the ability to think critically and solve problems.