IDS Chair Julian Willard Appointed Yale Research Fellow

Since launching Rivers’ Interdisciplinary Studies Department in 2009, Department Chair Julian Willard has focused on building a program that is educationally groundbreaking as well as perennially popular among students. Determined to expand the department’s offerings as well as opportunities for professional development for the faculty, he applied for and received a $50,000 grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation in 2012.

Once again, Willard has been recognized for his cutting-edge contributions to this burgeoning field, by being appointed to a one-year position as interdisciplinary research fellow at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He has also been accepted as a visiting scholar at The Hastings Center, the United States' pre-eminent centre for bioethics research.


“Next year I shall be dividing my time between Rivers, where I will continue to teach English and chair the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, and Yale, where I shall analyze the effectiveness of hospital educational outreach concerning the ethical issues involved in end of life care,” explains Willard. His own interest in ethics led to the development of the Exploring Ethics course at Rivers, which integrates English, biology, and philosophy in the study of central ethical concepts like free will, duty, and justice.

Rivers has always been fertile ground for exploring new ideas: the 21st Century Education Focus Group, which was started in 2008, draws together teachers from all disciplines throughout the year to discuss emerging issues in education, both in terms of content as well as teaching methods.

This shared intellectual curiosity has allowed Rivers faculty who teach the interdisciplinary courses to rely on their fellow teachers as guest lecturers, often spanning the subjects of art, history, science, and more, during a single course. For example, in Willard’s class, The Enlightenment, physics teacher Michael Schlenker usually gives an overview of the scientific dimension of the Enlightenment, discussing such figures as Galileo and Isaac Newton.

“Questions often get grouped comfortably into these tidy compartments like ‘politics,’ ‘history,’ and ‘math,’ but the important, thorny ones often require that we draw from many areas,” Willard has commented when discussing the department’s philosophy. “Drawing from other teachers’ knowledge is invaluable in creating interesting educational moments that really flesh out the course’s themes.”

“I hope that my independent research into effective interdisciplinary education will help Rivers to continue to develop its innovative program of interdisciplinary education, both in the IDS department itself and more widely in the school as a whole,” concludes Willard.