In 2014 I was delighted to be awarded an AHRC funded studentship through the CHASE consortium for my research on Umbrian patrons. On Saturday, 15th November, the 2014 CHASE cohort attended the inaugural annual Encounters Conference at the Courtauld Institute. It was stimulating to see the breadth of research being carried out at the Universities involved in CHASE; East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Essex, Goldsmiths College, The Courtauld, and the Open University. The theme of the day was Interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity has always been at the centre of what Sussex University is about, and has always been a subject close to my heart aswell.  As an art historian I am always trying to understand why an object looks the way it does, and to do this I have drawn on history (my first degree was in history) but also anthropology and sociology.  The difficulty comes with feeling sufficiently sure-footed in one of those other disciplines to read and reference theories with confidence.  This was a theme covered by Dr Maria Lauret at the conference, and it was reassuring to know that even senior academics feel the same!