Dr Sarah Dustagheer has spent over 20 years of her life studying and researching English Literature across three UK universities. Now, from her position as Head of the School of Humanities, she is able to share a unique perspective on the role that the humanities have in society today and why we couldn’t live without it.
Your new School brings English Literature, History and Classics under one (metaphorical) roof. What was the thinking behind this?
We cover thousands of years of culture, literature and history in our School, with a lot of shared practice in the ways that we think, teach and research across the three subjects. This is reflected not only in our course content, but our attitude. At Kent, we’re very passionate about the power of the humanities to change the world and we believe that through our degrees we are creating future citizens who are critically minded, engaged, and ready to face the world’s challenging questions.
The value of the humanities, especially as an area of study, has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent years. In your opinion, why should we still care about them?
I recently heard the physicist Brian Cox talk about this and it struck me as a really important question. We live in a complex world full of change and challenges, and I believe we need to shine as much light as possible on that. STEM illuminates things from one perspective, but we need the light from the humanities too to provide the full picture. It’s not a zero-sum game.
The humanities offer many ways of thinking about some of the challenges in the world, from enabling us to reflect on and learn from our past to thinking critically when dealing with lots of different materials so that we can find synergies between them. Another benefit is in the name ‘humanities’ itself: what it means to be human; what it meant to be human in the past, and what it means to be human now. This is all reflected in our past and current cultures, our histories and our texts. So much of what we do through the humanities is assessing what it is to be human i.e. how we connect, love, exist and make art. What could be more important than exploring that?
What are the challenges facing the study and teaching of humanities today? How is Kent addressing them?
One of the challenges we face is the domination of STEM subjects and narrative that pitches them against the humanities in terms of employability. In reality, our humanities degrees offer students crucial employability skills and our graduates are eminently employable, so we must push against that narrative and the devaluing of the arts and humanities, as it does a disservice to everybody.
We are working towards decolonising our curriculum and engaging students with questions of race, gender, sexuality and other difficult topics is an important part of what we do. The domination of STEM can often make it difficult for first generation students (the first in their family to go to university) and applicants of colour to choose a humanities degree over a more vocational degree as this can go against family or cultural expectations. At Kent, we’re here to support them with that and to give them the materials and arguments that they need to make their case. I say this as somebody who is the only humanities graduate coming from a Mauritian family of scientists and medics. Luckily, I have amazing parents who supported my decision to pursue the humanities when I was 18 but I know that that is not the case for other applicants of colour, so I am very supportive of our widening participation work. It’s very important to us that no matter the demographic of the students that come to us, we give them the best opportunity to achieve the best degree that they can.
How has the study of the humanities changed over the years, both across the sector and here at Kent?
With the rise of digital technology and AI, we encourage our students to think about how texts and culture are changing as a growing proportion of the population become digital natives. The result is an exciting blurring of boundaries in the humanities, raising questions about what a text is and what is worthy of study. In my own subject, English, we look at everything from medieval maps to graphic novels – the scope of what we do is enormous! Meanwhile, my colleagues in History are teaching contemporary history.
The blurring of boundaries between literature, history and classics is another interesting shift we’ve seen. The research we engage in and the texts our students read focus on what humanity has always been interested in: identity, sexuality, race and ethnicity. These may manifest differently in different time periods but across all three subjects, we’re using the past to think about the contentious and powerful issues in our own time, such as identity and culture wars. For instance, I teach a module on race and power in pre-modern history which provides insights into the roots of some of the biggest issues we’re currently facing. It’s this which is equipping students with the tools to tackle questions of social justice, inclusivity and equity in the world today.
Can you tell us about the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies? How does it bring the disciplines together?
The Centre brings together colleagues that work on the medieval and early modern period up to the 17th century. It is one of a kind and has a fantastic postgraduate research culture, with its own MA programme and research events and seminar series. As a member of the Centre, I think that what’s powerful about studying this period of history is that it’s where we can find the beginnings of capitalism, colonialism, individualism, and of secularism. It gives us a profound basis from which to think about contemporary issues.
The other reason this Centre is so important is that in the early modern period, they didn’t make distinctions between English Literature, History and Classics as subjects – it was all a real blur. The Centre allows for that blur to reemerge. For example, as a theatre historian, I am part of the English department, but I effectively practice history of Shakespearean theatre. It takes us back to that first question of why we’re together in one School; it just makes sense for these subjects to sit together because of their interwoven nature.
How does the School equip humanities students for employment? What kind of jobs do they go on to do?
Our students go on to everything and anything. We have students who go on to do what you might expect from humanities degrees, such as teaching and museum and archival work, but we also have students who go on to jobs that you might not expect. We have an alumni who is a senior member of the police force, and another who works in the House of Commons, for example. We also have students who go into the creative and cultural industries, marketing, communications and journalism, and those in the civil service. Humanities graduates have this breadth of career choice because these jobs require excellent reading and writing skills and the processing and presentation of information in a clear way. They require critical thinking, sophistication of thinking and a degree of empathy – all of which our students develop through their degrees.
It’s important to us that we support students to be deeply human, passionate about what they do and interested in social justice, equity, and civic engagement. We encourage this through a variety of means of assessment. Alongside traditional essay writing, students have opportunities to produce podcasts, make magazines, and present, which develops the skills that employers want to see, leading to great graduate outcomes.
And finally, does the School have any other notable connections?
The School actually has two Nobel Prize winners; the 2021 winner of the Novel Prize for Literature, Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, a successful novelist and English and Philosophy graduate who won the 2017 Novel Prize for Literature in 2017. Other notable alumni include award-winning romantic novelist Julie Hayworth and journalist and author Gavin Esler.