The body of topics, concerns, and activities annexed to a given branch of knowledge; commonly, “field of study.” In general usage, the term “field” is adjacent to and loosely synonymous or interchangeable with both SUBJECT and DISCIPLINE. Fields, insofar as they may refer to both professional and academic enterprise (e.g., both to endocrinological and to Renaissance studies), suspend the arguable separation between professions and disciplines. Nevertheless, in current parlance, “field” covers more ground than the scholastically connotative “subject,” whose application in the classroom hardly extends to the workplace. In the wonderland of ACADEMIA, a field is a veritable Alice, which is to say, an entity with variable dimensions when measured against subjects and disciplines. On the one hand, a scholar may call his/her field a subset of interests circumscribed by a broader academic designation. The field-coverage model endemic to English departments, for instance, refers to historical periods and, most recently, sociological and geopolitical categories as “fields” constitutive of literary studies at large. By contrast, a field may indicate a set of disciplines collectively (like a post-graduate version of the elementary “subject”), and thereby communicate less specificity (or, as it were, offset the punitive overtones of “discipline”). “Field” itself explicitly activates spatial connotations absent from either “subject” or “discipline.” Curiously, the literalism of a physical field reenters the academic context in the aspect of scientific or, in some cases, social scientific “fieldwork,” conducted outside the classroom and intended to develop practical, and sometimes professional, skills. Perhaps an ostensibly pedestrian synonym for “field” such as “territory,” however, has latent relevance to the distribution of intellectual property among disciplines and departments—or, by a reverse logic, a professional or academic “occupation” parses to a territorial claim? The coded assumption of territoriality reinforces speculation that, in fact, an academic field is a deceptively hospitable habitat for competitive gazelles engaged in eternal inter-and intra-generational conflict over circumscribed tracts of grassland.