I think in some ways the scope of this course may have been uncomfortable to history specialists and thus they hesitated to enroll, for usually graduate history courses have a very limited scope. Ten students enrolled, all of whom were graduate students. They were from the disciplines of Spanish and Portuguese, American studies, Latin American studies, sociology, and geography. The course was cross-listed in sociology, another department that I teach in. Although it was also cross-listed for International studies, there were not any students from that program enrolled.
With no historians in the class, I felt like I was dragging the other majors towards my discipline. However, I wanted them to make explicit what their discipline does and to consider the discourse that flows between disciplines. I think a lot of the students were already approaching an interdisciplinary mode, as was evidenced by their participation in this course.
