INCSA is uniquely placed to harness that future, by interpreting the nineteenth-century differently – not simply as ‘international’, or ‘interdisciplinary’, but as ‘intertemporal’ – as a century embedded in our lived experience today.  Amongst other things, intertemporality asks us how to exhibit nineteenth-century objects today; what to do about ethically challenging legacies; and why we continue to love period films and neo-gothic literature.  Intertemporality asks of time what internationality asks of place, and interdisciplinarity asks of the space describing our knowledge and understanding.  It asks us to ask ourselves what we think; how we think it; and why we think the way we do.  It asks us to believe that the nineteenth century is not just a chronological period – or even a ‘long’ century – in the past, but a living, breathing presence in our world today.

INCSA’s three keywords – international, interdisciplinary, intertemporal – all signal one thing.  They signal a fundamental belief in the interconnectedness that lies at the collective, collaborative heart of our approach to research; indeed, I would argue, at the heart of any good research.  The clue is in the name: research – ‘re’-‘search’.  We forget at our peril that the word ‘research’ begins with the prefix ‘re-’ and ends with the suffix ‘search’.  Genuine research is always interconnected, because it always connects to previous thought, no matter how current.  Researchers are not creators, perhaps, so much as they are builders, building – building creatively – upon the creative building of others.

Building and developing an organisation like INCSA that reflects those values is no mean feat, especially at a time when, paradoxically, the value of interconnectedness is being tested all over the world and at every level of our human existence – socially, politically, environmentally, technologically, and so on.  We live in a world that seems to have forgotten the significance of the almost tautological prefix ‘inter’ implicit in the very word ‘connected’.  Anything ‘connected’ is ‘inter’-connected, by its very nature.  Any ‘search’ is actually ‘re’-‘search; any word, an ‘after’-word – a word that exists only because it exists after another existed before it in time, in place, in space.  Any one of us is more than just the individual we are as an autonomous human being.  We are intrinsically inter-connected, to one another through time, through place, through space.  We are, in our own ways, both the subject and the object of our own ‘re-search’, searching again and again for our overlapping connectedness to others – and to their times, their places, their historical cultural spaces – to what we consider the very heart of their being.

There are not only many ways of defining interconnectedness (like intertemporality, internationality and interdisciplinarity), but many ways of practicing it too; in fact, every discipline seems to have its own name for it.  One branch of psychology calls it ‘withness’ theory – or being with someone in a phenomenological sense.  When I was growing up in the 1970s, I can remember people saying, ‘I’m with you, man’, which is to say, I understand where you’re coming from.  Music calls the practice of interconnectedness something else.  Music calls it musicking.  According to ethnomusicologist Chris Small, musicking is the social activity of anything music-related – composing, listening, performing, researching and so on.  Musicking is nothing if it is not shared or connected in some way, even if it is ‘shared’ without an audience, without listeners, without performers or even other researchers.  Musicking, according to Small, can simply be the act of making music in the mind.  In his famous essay ‘On the School of Giorgione’ (1877) the famous art and literary critic Walter Pater calls interconnectedness ‘anders-streben’ – or, literally in German, ‘other-seeking’.  Remarkably, in his description of a painting called ‘The Concert’ Pater uses anders-streben to explain how the painting replicates visually the very ‘sound’ of the musical performance it aims to depict.  Pater’s contribution to interconnectedness is remarkable, anticipating the word ‘interdiscipline’ by some 50 years, and Tom Mitchell’s famous picture theory by roughly a hundred.  Pater was a thinker ahead of his time – a Victorian Englishman replicating in the sound of his description the visual imagery of an Italian Renaissance painting depicting a concert.  Like INCSA, his ideas are interdisciplinary, international, intertemporal.

Withness; musicking; anders-streben: these are just some of the many current and historical concepts that disciplines have evolved to express the practice of interconnectedness.  Unsurprisingly, there are many more, and I would like to focus on just one, if I may – this one from the discipline of Theology.  The concept is what my colleague here at Durham, Jeff Astley, refers to as ‘ordinary theology’.  Ordinary theology is anything but ordinary, because it emphasizes how the ordinary stuff of human experience can reveal something extraordinary – how, for example, the sheer sound of nature can make us think about the state and preservation of our environment.

Of course, every discipline believes that it can do that – that it can reveal the extraordinary – but it is always through the ordinary that we reveal the extraordinary – through the very ordinary, rudimentary material stuff of history – of words, of colours, of sounds – that the ordinary becomes extraordinary in great books, great paintings, great and lasting music.  In the same way, it is through the national that we reveal the international; the disciplinary that we reveal the interdisciplinary; the temporal that we reveal the intertemporal.  It is with the use of the prefix ‘inter’ that the ordinary, one might say, metamorphoses into the extraordinary when we research.  ‘Inter’ is what makes the ordinary extraordinary.

This is why INCSA foregrounds the use of the prefix ‘inter’ in its name and in its three keywords, not simply to pay lip service to fashionable trends in current thinking, but to emphasize the importance of interconnectedness in a world which seems to have forgotten the ‘inter’ of ‘connectedness’.

Ultimately, INCSA aims to reimagine our nineteenth-century past as an interconnected vector for time, place and space – for internationality, interdisciplinarity, and intertemporality and their own interconnectedness.  And we can only do that if we reimagine ourselves like that as well – not simply as ordinary individuals, but as part of the extraordinary community that INCSA aims to represent.  You joined INCSA to do more than simply attend its inaugural conference, but to make a difference to the way we think and act about ourselves and our world, and to re-envision the way nineteenth-century studies can help us do that today.  The Nineteenth-Century Today: International, Interdisciplinary, Intertemporal – it is not simply the name of our inaugural conference. It is a challenge, and an invitation to us all, both individually and collectively – a challenge to practice what we preach; an invitation to redefine the way we interconnect in our world.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to your nineteenth-century today, and to thank you for your important contribution to INCSA and nineteenth-century studies more broadly.  I wish you a wonderful conference, and a wonderful nineteenth-century future.