Rigorous. Meticulous. Judicious. Trenchant. Such are the adjectives often applied to good scholarship. Rarely do we see someone’s scholarship described as “fun,” and when we do, it doesn’t sound like much of a compliment. But why should that be the case? Those of us who are scholars chose the path we did because we enjoyed it, because we found much of the intellectual work—whether our own or others’—to be, well, fun. Yet fun is often a casualty at academic conferences and in academic publications. We believe our work is a serious matter—it is a serious matter—and that seriousness of purpose seems inconsistent with a sense of fun and playfulness.
Bernard Schweizer, delivering his paper, ‘Humour and Boundaries: Rethinking the Heresy of Laughter’
My most powerful impression of the Third Conference of the International Society for Heresy Studies is the openness with which this group of scholars embraces the fun they find in their work. In the first panel on the first day of the conference Bernard Schweizer discussed the humor of heretical jokes. His work makes the seriousness of those most unserious of things—jokes—perfectly apparent, while never losing sight of the pleasures both of the jokes and of the intellectual work of comprehending how and why jokes work (or, as is often the case, don’t work). That panel was followed by the first of our keynote speakers, Devorah Baum, whose discussion of Jewish jokes was simultaneously hysterically funny and powerfully incisive. I have never laughed so much during a conference presentation, and rarely have I learned so much from one.
And then there was the panel to which I contributed, titled “The Fantastic, the Gothic and the Occult.” I had thought that my paper on the early Gothic (“How Heresy Became Entertainment”) might be perceived as frivolous, but it was an excellent complement to the work on nineteenth-century mediumship and twentieth-century science fiction that my co-panelists presented. The pleasures contained in the heretical/unorthodox works of the writers and thinkers we discussed were at the forefront of our discussion, because why would we even be discussing these writers and thinkers today if they had not been appealing to their contemporaries? And all of this is to say nothing of the pleasure I took in the conversations I had during our coffee breaks and at the Society dinner on the final evening of the conference.
A depiction of women reading Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, an early text to treat Catholic “heresy” as entertainment. ()
What is most surprising about how much fun our little scholarly community had in London was that it was surprising at all. Looking back through the archives of exCommunicated, I see that I had a similar response to our 2016 conference in New York. In my reflection on that conference, I celebrated the “unorthodox” inclusion of art at a conference investigating the significance of art. Why this should be unorthodox remains as puzzling to me now as it was then, but there is no denying that most conferences on literature and the humanities only involve art at secondhand—through its analysis, rather than through direct experience of it. Again, there is a sense that fun must be excluded from the rational space of the academic conference. Here I recall another of our keynote speakers at the London conference, Daniel Trilling, editor of The New Humanist. Trilling noted that out of all of the controversial subjects on which he has received angry letters from subscribers, the subject on which he has received the most angry letters is… the magazine’s decision to publish a selection of poetry in every issue. Apparently, many of The New Humanist’s subscribers don’t believe humanism and fun should mix, either.
I will be stepping down as ISHS Webmaster soon after four years in the position. What the Society has been for me in these years—at its conferences and in the pages of exCommunicated—is a frequent reminder of how much fun it can be to do meaningful scholarship. That fact is one I intend to keep front and center in my future scholarly projects.
Post-conference dinner at Antalya. Clockwise from lower left: Saku Pihko, Matthew Ingleby, Aren Roukema, Morton Beckmann, Henry Mead, Christos Hadjiyiannis, Geremy Carnes, Trista Doyle, Gregory Erickson, Michael Abraham
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