Crossing Borders

Jonathan Hess leads the University Fellows into interdisciplinary territory

Photo by Will Owens

Professor Jonathan Hess teaches in the Department of Germanic Languages and leads interdisciplinary dialogue as faculty adviser to the University Fellows.

Graduate students arrive at Carolina ready to embark on a learning journey that will culminate with a significant contribution to a field, making them experts on a very specialized subject. Tunnel vision is sometimes necessary.

For University Fellows, however, the chance to engage in dialogue with students focusing on subjects outside of their areas of study is what makes the group so dynamic and their experience so enriching. It’s also what University Fellows Adviser Jonathan Hess enjoys most about working with the group.

“Most of our research is basically very narrow and disciplinary specific. Even if you speak to broad audiences, they’re always select audiences,” he said. “The whole Society of Fellows brings students together from different disciplines, enables them to share their research and forces them to speak across disciplinary boundaries.”

Hess, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages, arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1993. At Carolina, his research has focused on German cultural, intellectual and literary history. His most recent book, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, is an in-depth look at the debates on Jewish emancipation that took place in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. During that time Jews made up only 1 percent of the German population, but questions regarding their rights and their place in German society were hotly debated.

“If you look at 1750, the Jewish population wasn’t prominent, wasn’t influential and wasn’t culturally visible, but the whole issue of whether we should give these people rights or not was explosive politically,” Hess explained. “What I tried to do in the book was to understand why they were interested in this and what sorts of issues came together in talking about emancipating Jews, also looking at how Jews participated in this debate themselves.”

Hess’ interest in German Jewish studies dates back to his days as a graduate student, which he acknowledges allowed for only limited interdisciplinary learning. Working with the University Fellows, he gets it in healthy doses.

The fellows are a select group of doctoral graduate students in a myriad of disciplines whose awards are named in honor of Mrs. Victor Humphreys, William R. Kenan Jr., Joseph E. Pogue and William N. Reynolds.

Hess has been on the board of the Society of Fellows since 1998 and began advising the University Fellows during the 2002-03 school year. In that time the group of students from across the University, under Hess’ leadership, organized the Centennial Forum on “Faith and Public Life,” which brought together students, academics and professionals to explore the issues and interactions of secularism,
faith and the separation of church and state.

“The neat thing about this,” Hess said, “is that we have students from diverse fields such as epidemiology, physics, English, anthropology and ecology, and we all get to talk about these big issues—sort of like we’re undergraduates again, but we’re smarter.”

For the spring 2003 forum, the fellows chose the topic based on their interest in the Summer Reading Program selection for that school year, Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Hess said the controversy that ensued over the book selection and the issues the controversy raised intrigued the students, but their ideas soon began hinting at broader issues including government funding for faith-based initiatives and the role and responsibilities of a public institution such as Carolina.

The fellows gathered a group of academics and professionals from various areas to offer their expertise. The panelists were Lumbé Davis of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, who also had administered a faith-based program; Seth Jaffe, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina; Phillip Leach, pastor and campus minister with Carolina’s Newman Catholic Student Center; Penny Maguire of the N.C. Department of Public Instruction; and Kory Swanson, vice president for administration at the John Locke Foundation. Carolina Law Professor Bill Marshall, a constitutional law specialist and former deputy White House counsel, served as moderator.

Photo by Will Owens

Professor Jonathan Hess converses with Pogue Fellow Richard Benson and Reynolds Fellow Ming Yu, members of the University Fellows group planning the 2004 forum on arts and public life.

“We had a really interesting, diverse group of people,” Hess said. “It made for a fascinating discussion that allowed us to reflect on what it is we do here ultimately, which is part of the goal of the Fellows Forum.”

This year, the fellows are turning their attention to the arts, focusing on the roles of arts in public life and the function of public art, touching on issues such as censorship, funding and dissent. The advantage for the fellows is their interdisciplinary approach.

Hess explained, “We’re trying to do this in a way that might be different from what might be done in
the art department—a much broader discussion on the status of the arts today and of the public controversies art provokes both here on campus and in the broader community.”

The questions raised compel the students to step outside of their fields and think about new ideas,
which is the program’s overarching goal. As Hess pointed out, few graduate students can boast of such an opportunity.

“Typically, they go through graduate school and learn to speak a very highly specialized language, learn to become a leader in a very small field,” he said. “The University Fellows program enriches
graduate students’ experience tremendously, giving our future experts a forum in which they get to speak to each other and have to find a way to do so effectively.”

– Alexandra Obregon

© 2004, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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