Cultural studies and the politics of disciplinarity: An introduction

It was over thirty years ago-in what now seems almost the darkbeginnings and abysm of cultural time and certainly in the prehistoric era of what we ordinarily think of as American cultural studies-that an English department faculty member became fascinated with modern physics and the creation of the atomic bomb.1 He couldn’t let go of the topic and eventually decided to do something like an institutional and interpersonal cultural history of the work at Los Alamos and Livermore. To do so he had to acquire informally and unofficially the equivalent of the working knowledge of a physics Ph.D.2 Over a period of time, auditing courses, talking with Physics professors, and doing independent reading, he did just that. Meanwhile, he travelled across the country to interview about a hundred veterans of Livermore Labs, the Manhattan project, and related physics enterprises and began to think and write. The book that came of all this work, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1968) by Nuel Pharr Davis, made something of a splash. It was reviewed positively on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the only book by a member of his department ever to find its way there. Soon there was a British edition, and before long Lawrence and Oppenheimer was translated into French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.