Specialization gets a bad rap. But think of someone whose opinion you really respect on a particular subject. That person is likely to be a specialist. That person's "general" knowledge is also likely to be pretty good, as good as that of the so-caled "generalist," maybe. Let's say the foremost expert on Mahler knows as much about Mozart as the person who knows a little about everything in music but is not the foremost expert on anything in particular. My girlfriend is the foremost tourist guide-book writer on Japan, and she also knows a lot about places that aren't Japan, more than the casual traveller who doesn't even know one place well.
It is normal to start out narrowly. I was a specialist on one genre, in one country and one period of time, and knew about one poet more than any other. That is what I have seen in Assistant Professors in my department over the years too. Then I branched out to other poets, went back in time to the modernist period from the postwar, still doing one genre and one nation. I knew about other things, but I was only authoritative about that. Then I decided to do the 1st Lorca book, and drew on previously untapped parts of the scholarly base. Still highly specialized, but now it doesn't look so bad, does it? A full professor is still a specialist, just broader and deeper. By developing depth on any topic, you also develop breadth, branching out to learn the other things you need in order to understand your topic. Personally, I see the breadth as a normal part of intellectual curiosity about things that aren't your speciality, and the depth as your mastery of your domain.
This is more or less the folk theory of the PhD dissertation I picked up in computer science: that one goes deep in the dissertation to show that one can, even at the price of narrowness. The skills thus demonstrated are expected to carry over into a career of broader work.
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