Close Up
Interdisciplinary thinking at heart of work
Tim Dean says a humanities center can contribute greatly to the intellectual life on a college campus, and he sees his position as director of UB’s Humanities Institute as an opportunity to make that happen at UB. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“I think the most important and enduring research issues can’t really be solved from within one discipline. They have to be solved by researchers collaborating and speaking outside of their usual parameters.”
“You can always say I’m from the same town as Clive Owen,” Tim Dean, director of the Humanities Institute, says when asked what is interesting about his life. “He’s from the same part of town. He’s exactly the same age as me. He graduated from high school the same year as me.
“I’m just trying to throw in some color for you,” explains Dean, 45, who holds a faculty appointment as a professor in the Department of English.
But while Clive Owen is an attention grabber, Dean does not need the British actor to bring color to his story. Dean has plenty of character on his own. He is deeply thoughtful and brightly dressed, a tall man with a lean frame, plastic-rimmed glasses and, one recent afternoon, an aquamarine tie. A scholar of American poetry and psychoanalysis, he carries himself with an air of amusement and curiosity. His latest book, published by the University of Chicago Press, weighs in at 237 pages and carries the title “Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking.” A rich academic career has taken Dean to Baltimore; Seattle; Palo Alto, Calif.; Champaign, Ill.; and, finally, to Buffalo.
All this for a boy from Coventry, a manufacturing city that Dean describes as the “Detroit of England.” His father taught at a technical college, training engineers who worked in a declining auto industry. His mother was a homemaker. After high school, Dean went to work for the government.
“I was a civil servant,” Dean remembers. “I worked for the department of employment during the years when unemployment in my town was 30 percent. So they were hiring people like me to pay people like Clive Owen. Back then, 3 percent of the population went to college. It wasn’t democratic at all. It was this weird thing. Nobody in my high school went to college. Clive Owen didn’t go to college.”
The job was stable, but not long after starting, Dean had an epiphany: “I just realized that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.”
To escape, he enrolled at the University of East Anglia, choosing American studies as his field. (By way of explanation, he says, “I was very curious about the United States, having never been abroad, having never been anywhere. We got lots of American culture on TV, so I was sort of obsessed with this surreal place, the United States.”)
Dean spent a year overseas at Brandeis University, wrote a senior thesis on American poet Gary Snyder that was later published as a book and returned to the U.S. in 1988 to study English and American literature in Johns Hopkins University’s doctoral program. He finished his degree in 1994 and went on from there to faculty posts at the University of Washington-Seattle and University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. He joined UB’s English department in 2002 and became director of the UB Humanities Institute in 2008, operating from a boxy, Clemens Hall office where he keeps an oriental carpet and a green Dirt Devil vacuum.
Dean says while “it’s not my life’s dream to be an administrator,” he sees his position at the institute as “a real opportunity.” In the late 1990s, he spent a year as a junior fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center, regularly lunching and meeting with colleagues from disciplines ranging from history and philosophy to classics. Explaining his work to researchers outside his field and seeing how they framed problems helped Dean discover new ways of thinking about his areas of inquiry.
“It was an incredibly fertile time for me,” he says. “I suppose ever since that year at Stanford, I’ve seen what it is that a great humanities center can do for the intellectual life on campus, and I’ve been keen to help achieve something like that on this campus,” Dean says. “And I think the most important and enduring research issues can’t really be solved from within one discipline. They have to be solved by researchers collaborating and speaking outside of their usual parameters.”
At UB, under Dean’s leadership, the Humanities Institute hosts programs designed to bring faculty members from varied fields together to think about problems. A new lecture series this year, “On Belief,” features invited experts in specialties ranging from anthropology and Asian studies to Christian studies. Talks in the series carry such tantalizing titles as “Love and the Heretic” and “The Hypnotist: After Effects of the Tsunami in Sumatra.”
In research workshops on such subjects as “Queer Theory,” “Time and Memory” and “Cultural Studies of Space,” UB faculty members and graduate students from diverse disciplines present research and explore topics of common intellectual concern. The institute provides seed money for these groups to sponsor guest speakers, seminars and conferences.
Dean not only preaches the importance of interdisciplinary thinking. His work and interests embody that concept, spanning and drawing connections between two seemingly divergent fields: poetry and psychoanalysis (which Dean describes as the study and interpretation of the unconscious, a tradition started by Sigmund Freud).
He describes his love for poetry, saying that “it seems an incredibly powerful use of language,” with language “compressed and more resonant” in a poem than in ordinary uses. The sounds and rhythm in poetry, like music, trigger emotion and sensation, speaking to humans in a way that seems to transcend the rational and cognitive, that go beyond the meaning of the words, Dean says.
And what does that have to do with psychoanalysis?
“I think of Freud as a late romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry so I don’t have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or moving or intriguing or amusing—whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in,” Dean wrote not long ago in a short article describing the links between his two passions.
“Poetry, like psychoanalysis, is not true in the way that we consider science to be true,” Dean wrote. “It doesn’t describe objects or experiences in ways that can be reliably verified. If poetry, like psychoanalysis, has an impact, then we describe it as subjectively, rather than objectively true. We say that it resonates. Perhaps it haunts us or makes our world look different. Perhaps it brings us pleasure, rather than solid facts or something that can be translated into income. Perhaps we find it intriguing without quite knowing why.”
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