In the Humanities and the Natural Sciences

I found the activity of classifying Bryn Mawr College’s English Department very challenging.  Attempting to understand what knowledge and skills individual professors offer the department highlighted the different methodologies available for studying literature.  Genre, time period, language, nationality, and medium are all relevant ways of organizing literary criticism.  This is not true of the natural sciences.  Only current scientific knowledge is considered relevant.  The phenomena studied by scientists are not affected by language, location, or culture.  Therefore, the structure of natural science departments is very different from humanities departments.  For example, Bryn Mawr’s chemistry department is consists of professors who specialize in particular subfields of chemistry: organic chemistry, biochemistry, inorganic chemistry, and physical chemistry.  These are the genres of chemistry.