Rethinking combined departments An argument for History and Anthropology AGEETH SLUIS AND ELISE EDWARDS  ABSTRACT Many opportunities for more integrated teaching that better capture the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary scholars’ work and bet- ter achieve the aims of liberal arts education still remain untapped, particularly at smaller schools where combined departments are often necessary. The disciplinary boundaries between history and socio- cultural anthropology have become increasingly blurred in recent decades, a trend reflected in scholarly work that engages with both fields, as well as dual-degree graduate programmes at top U.S. re- search universities. For many scholars, this interdisciplinarity makes sense, with the two disciplines offering critical theoretical tools and methods that must be used in combination to tackle effectively the questions they pursue. This article asks why this interdisciplinarity, so central to professional pursuits of both historians and anthropologists, is significantly less present in the undergraduate classroom. Housed in one of the only joint History and Anthropology departments in the U.S., we detail our own efforts to make the chance joining of our disciplines pedagogically meaningful. KEYWORDS Anthropology, educational practices, higher education, History, inter- disciplinarity, liberal arts education, teaching methods  Introduction In recent decades, increased interdisciplinarity has occurred across aca- demic fields and institutions for a range of intellectual and economic reasons. Although many U.S. universities and liberal arts colleges can trace their earliest experiments with interdisciplinary programmes to the 1960s and 1970s, evolving research agendas, the need to deal with intensifying forces of globalisation, and a range of other factors have made interdisciplinary programmes, such as science and technology studies (STS), gender studies, Learning and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 1, Spring 2013: 72–88 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/latiss.2013.060105 ISSN 1755-2273 (Print), ISSN 1755-2281 (Online)