Applying For History Jobs With Africana Studies PhD?

[hazeus]

One I will throw out: you might be able to adjunct at a CC while working on your PhD. I don't think the probability of a CC job is that good either (not my area) but it might open a door with CC and small teaching colleges.

I'm assuming when people say "there are no jobs" this includes (TT?) CC and high teaching load jobs?

[hazeus]

Please help.

5 years in grad school + 3 years on the market is 8 years. Think about how old you will be at that point and what it will feel like to have to start over with something else when it becomes clear that you are in the 90%* of graduate-educated historians who don't get a TT job anywhere.

That is the opportunity cost that clean mentions.  The new recurring theme on some parts of these fora is pushing back on the advice to go do something else when "those folks have invested the better part of a decade in preparing for this job.  It's just cruel to insist they start over doing something else".

You, hazeus, are at a point where you haven't invested those 8 years yet.  This is your real life now and what you do now matters.  Now is a very good time to wait out the economy recovery in a fully funded program (you are fully funded, right?  Otherwise, the advice is to get out now to do literally anything else instead of taking on more debt) while you work on being in a better situation in a couple years.

If you want to be in, say, TRIO programs or career services, then apply for those jobs now with the experience you have.  Look carefully at the institution's long-term prospects in terms of enrollment and finances before accepting any job, but go ahead and start applying now.  Sometimes, it takes a couple years to get the right job. Getting started on climbing the relevant career ladder will be a better use of your time than more history courses or AHA attendance.

I also recommend going through some non-academic job sites and career planning sites to look at skills you can develop now that will position you for applying for a wide variety of jobs later.  For example, I picked up using R for statistical studies, Python for scripting, and LaTeX for creating reports using the outputs.  That's been more useful at many turns for getting a good enough job with skills employers want over the formal degrees that may or may not be explicitly desired.

The advice by people with tenure at large enough places to have real multidisciplinary departments is likely not going to be applicable to you on the market several years from now.  The history market is already glutted and it will get worse as current lecturers, adjuncts, VAPs, and even TT/T folks lose their jobs and will be back on the market immediately.  There's no way that we're going to have lots more academic history jobs in the next couple of years so the market will be even worse when you graduate than it is now.

Having teaching HS history as a fallback is a very common Plan B for those with graduate degrees in history.  Thus, that market is also glutted and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.  If you were a math or physics HS teacher, then that would be different, but HS history is not a near slam-dunk fall back plan.  What's your Plan C?

* We can quibble about exact numbers, but "really, really awful" from tenured people doesn't send the same message as "near certainty of failure for the newcomers to the field".

Yikes. Honestly, HS teaching might be a better deal. No harm in leaving with a terminal masters I guess...

[tuxthepenguin]

One I will throw out: you might be able to adjunct at a CC while working on your PhD. I don't think the probability of a CC job is that good either (not my area) but it might open a door with CC and small teaching colleges.

I'm assuming when people say "there are no jobs" this includes (TT?) CC and high teaching load jobs?

A lot of times these discussions focus exclusively on 4-year institutions. In a lot of cases, research places. But whatever they're talking about, CC, SLAC, teaching oriented publics, and research (R1/R2) schools are all different and look for different things. My understanding is that experience at a CC and demonstrating an understanding of what needs to be done in the job, combined with a PhD, will make you a much stronger candidate for CC jobs. I'm at an R1, and I doubt I'd even get an interview at a CC or SLAC due to the big gap between my background and what they need. I've learned from my grad students quite a lot about how these things work.

[jerseyjay]

One I will throw out: you might be able to adjunct at a CC while working on your PhD. I don't think the probability of a CC job is that good either (not my area) but it might open a door with CC and small teaching colleges.

At my relatively small public university (4/4 load for full time faculty), you could almost certainly get a job teaching introductory history world history courses in my department. We have hired literature PhDs, high school teachers, opera singers, and many, many, grad students in an array of "studies" programs. But none of this would lead to a tenure track job.

In my knowledge, we have hired three people who had been adjuncts here to the tenure track (including me)--over probably more than 150 adjuncts over this period. That's actually quite high. However, all have history PhDs from top-notch programs. And more importantly, all had the luck of coming along when a job opened up.  Even in good times, being an adjunct will not lead to a full-time job. And being an adjunct with credentials that are "good enough" to teach part-time does not mean that your credentials would be considered good enough for hiring on the tenure track.

Again, if somebody's "back-up" plan is to maybe be able to get a job as an adjunct and hopefully turn that into a full-time job in history, that is not a good place to be.

[polly_mer]

Before COVID-19 hit, the annual AHA jobs report was published with a summary article in Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/13/history-jobs-report-indicates-market-may-be-stabilizing

I strongly suggest you read that article and do some number crunching based what that market will look like for all the people for the past N years who are still on the market and didn't get a job.  And that's before people who had academic jobs started losing them due to the current pandemic.

My post regarding the likelihood of failure was meant to highlight the discrepancies between when currently tenured people obtained their jobs and how very much worse the job market is.  I've been reading a lot recently about why people don't heed warnings, but instead look for the brightest possible interpretations.  Having a lottery winner say, oh, but most people don't win like I did, tends to focus the recipient's mind on the fact that people do win, not the high odds of losing.  Explicitly doing the math to emphasize that nearly everyone loses is a way to strengthen the message based on what we know about trying to change people's minds from the research on how people process information when they already have a strong opinion.

If somebody were trying to break into my field from elsewhere (which, as I said, seems like a fool's errand), then yes, the advice would be that they have to (1) publish in our top generalist and specialist journals, and lots, (2) be well-networked and conferenced in this field, to the exclusion of their home field, (3) demonstrating coursework in the target field at a top university in the target field wouldn't hurt, either. And while publishing in our top specialist journals probably wouldn't hurt them in their home field, I doubt their home field would be impressed by/know what to make of pubs in our top generalist journals.

All of that is the research side of academia, not the teaching side.  For the 4/4 (5/5) TT jobs in history (i.e., most of them per the AHA's statements on the job situation), this is the kiss of death because it's preparing for a completely different job that happens to have the same title.

Could you elaborate on this?

The AHA jobs article indicates that most of the current history jobs are at teaching institutions, although about half of the TT jobs in the past year were at research institutions.  Drawing on my knowledge of the worries about those small, underresourced, teaching institutions closing, the job market in the next couple years will be whatever adjective is three steps beyond brutal for those who have a record of solid teaching trying to compete for a job category that is shrinking.

We have had many, many, many discussions on these fora over the years about the different weightings between research, service, and
teaching.  The academic job market is not a continuum from the most elite through regional comprehensives to S(mall)LACs to community college.  A research job with a 2/2 load that includes graduate teaching and some service as a graduate advisor is a very different day-to-day job than a 4/4 load teaching mostly general education classes to non-majors while being an undergraduate advisor and doing a substantial amount of committee work with possible summers/breaks spent on research.

Search committee members are acutely aware of the differences in those jobs and thus look for experience (or at least high awareness of the realities) of the job being offered.  Job applicants often see the equivalent of "musician" so they apply when they are fabulous trumpeteers when what the committee is looking for is a percussionist with good reason to believe they will also be a lead singer and sometimes roadie.  One of the recurring discussions that tends to happen this time of year is people who are quite angry when they look up who got the TT jobs at the "low prestige institutions" and the poster has an objectively better research record and has taught a couple of the required courses at a much higher prestige institution. 

Thus, focusing on research tends to lead to one type of faculty job.  Great teachers who don't also have lengthy research records also tend to post their frustrations this time of year about how silly it is to pass them over (again) when they would be great researchers if only they could get the type of job that allows for the time and energy to do research.  After all, they were great in grad school and would be great again if given the necessary conditions conducive to the work.

Being evenly spread between teaching and research often means entering the fierce competition for who is willing to be paid the least to attempt the impossible of maintaining a high research output while teaching a lot to people who may or may not want to learn, advising a lot possibly outside the major or trying to keep a dying graduate program alive, and serving on a lot of campus committees.

In short, preparing for the type of history professor job that most people want is not actually all that good at preparing someone to be competitive for most of the history professor jobs that people have.  In addition, history is an area where adjunctification has a firm foothold so that looking only at other PhDs for full-time employment greatly underestimates the competition for jobs where someone with a master's degree will be a solid part of the adjunct pool and cost significantly less than any full-time faculty member.

[polly_mer]

One I will throw out: you might be able to adjunct at a CC while working on your PhD. I don't think the probability of a CC job is that good either (not my area) but it might open a door with CC and small teaching colleges.

I'm assuming when people say "there are no jobs" this includes (TT?) CC and high teaching load jobs?

A lot of times these discussions focus exclusively on 4-year institutions. In a lot of cases, research places. But whatever they're talking about, CC, SLAC, teaching oriented publics, and research (R1/R2) schools are all different and look for different things. My understanding is that experience at a CC and demonstrating an understanding of what needs to be done in the job, combined with a PhD, will make you a much stronger candidate for CC jobs. I'm at an R1, and I doubt I'd even get an interview at a CC or SLAC due to the big gap between my background and what they need. I've learned from my grad students quite a lot about how these things work.

The CCs are renowned for having already converted to pools of master's-holding adjuncts over full-time positions in the humanities and social sciences.

Having a PhD and experience means one is expensive in the current market, especially for a general education field at the CC like history (I don't know that it's even possible to get an AA in history).  Everything I'm reading that has any sort of positive outlook for CCs points to health care certificates/licenses and trades certificates/apprenticeships/licenses.  It's possible that some places will save themselves by acquiring a new mission for teachers, social workers, or child care workers for those who cannot relocate for 4 years and will keep working their current jobs until they graduate.  It's not looking good for many CCs in terms of being a cheaper alternative to the first two years of college to "get the gen ed requirements out of the way".

Five years ago, I would have agreed with the suggestion of expanding into that teaching experience, but not today under today's conditions.

[Parasaurolophus]

If somebody were trying to break into my field from elsewhere (which, as I said, seems like a fool's errand), then yes, the advice would be that they have to (1) publish in our top generalist and specialist journals, and lots, (2) be well-networked and conferenced in this field, to the exclusion of their home field, (3) demonstrating coursework in the target field at a top university in the target field wouldn't hurt, either. And while publishing in our top specialist journals probably wouldn't hurt them in their home field, I doubt their home field would be impressed by/know what to make of pubs in our top generalist journals.

All of that is the research side of academia, not the teaching side.  For the 4/4 (5/5) TT jobs in history (i.e., most of them per the AHA's statements on the job situation), this is the kiss of death because it's preparing for a completely different job that happens to have the same title.

Sure. I was just addressing the theoretical question of what would be needed to even attempt that kind of move. Like I said, I know it rarely works in one direction, and I doubt it works at all in the other. Either way, not a great plan.

I'm assuming when people say "there are no jobs" this includes (TT?) CC and high teaching load jobs?

Yup.

The CC jobs generally aren't as well-advertised, so sometimes they're mostly left out of the discussion. But even if you include them, that doesn't do a ton to budge the numbers in the right direction. To be fair, however, even doubling the number of available jobs wouldn't necessarily do a ton to budge the numbers in the right direction. I mean, it would be significant, don't get me wrong. But it would still leave you with a horrific job market. And it's harder to break into a CC applicant pool if you're from away.

FWIW, my sense is that philosophy is about as bad as history, or a little worse. Across all specializations, there are usually around 180-200 or so junior-level TT jobs advertised in the US each year (plus about five in Canada, and a couple dozen in the UK). Now, that's not counting most CC jobs, so there's that. The downsides are (1) that they're carved up by area of specialization, so that easily narrows your pool to ~30 jobs if you're in a well-supplied subfield, 0-5 if you aren't, plus around 30 'open' specialization jobs that only ever actually go to a couple of subfields, and (2) it's estimated there are 2000-3000 people on the market at any one time. FWIW, my rejections typically cite ~650 applicants, even for crappy jobs in crappy places. Two have cited 1200 applicants. Occasionally you get lucky at hear about ~300 applicants.

[apl68]

Please help.

5 years in grad school + 3 years on the market is 8 years. Think about how old you will be at that point and what it will feel like to have to start over with something else when it becomes clear that you are in the 90%* of graduate-educated historians who don't get a TT job anywhere.

That is the opportunity cost that clean mentions.  The new recurring theme on some parts of these fora is pushing back on the advice to go do something else when "those folks have invested the better part of a decade in preparing for this job.  It's just cruel to insist they start over doing something else".

You, hazeus, are at a point where you haven't invested those 8 years yet.  This is your real life now and what you do now matters.  Now is a very good time to wait out the economy recovery in a fully funded program (you are fully funded, right?  Otherwise, the advice is to get out now to do literally anything else instead of taking on more debt) while you work on being in a better situation in a couple years.

If you want to be in, say, TRIO programs or career services, then apply for those jobs now with the experience you have.  Look carefully at the institution's long-term prospects in terms of enrollment and finances before accepting any job, but go ahead and start applying now.  Sometimes, it takes a couple years to get the right job. Getting started on climbing the relevant career ladder will be a better use of your time than more history courses or AHA attendance.

I also recommend going through some non-academic job sites and career planning sites to look at skills you can develop now that will position you for applying for a wide variety of jobs later.  For example, I picked up using R for statistical studies, Python for scripting, and LaTeX for creating reports using the outputs.  That's been more useful at many turns for getting a good enough job with skills employers want over the formal degrees that may or may not be explicitly desired.

The advice by people with tenure at large enough places to have real multidisciplinary departments is likely not going to be applicable to you on the market several years from now.  The history market is already glutted and it will get worse as current lecturers, adjuncts, VAPs, and even TT/T folks lose their jobs and will be back on the market immediately.  There's no way that we're going to have lots more academic history jobs in the next couple of years so the market will be even worse when you graduate than it is now.

Having teaching HS history as a fallback is a very common Plan B for those with graduate degrees in history.  Thus, that market is also glutted and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.  If you were a math or physics HS teacher, then that would be different, but HS history is not a near slam-dunk fall back plan.  What's your Plan C?

* We can quibble about exact numbers, but "really, really awful" from tenured people doesn't send the same message as "near certainty of failure for the newcomers to the field".

Yikes. Honestly, HS teaching might be a better deal. No harm in leaving with a terminal masters I guess...

Yes, if you can get a HS position that might be better.  Spork and polly are correct that a tenure-track position in history is an exceedingly remote possibility no matter how you position yourself.  It's going to be HS, alt-ac, or something outside of academia.  Most, if not all, of that will not require a PhD.

If you're a fully funded PhD student then, as polly says, it might be a good idea to stay in the program for the time being.  If you really, really love the research, and your funding holds out, then you could treat earning the PhD as a good mid-term gig.  But it's highly unlikely that continuing through to the PhD is going to benefit your career in the long run.  Sorry.

[Caracal]

You're getting a lot of advice, but it isn't very well targeted. I know you know this, but there's a lot of confusion on Africana studies in the comments. Africana studies is a field that studies people of African descent, in Africa, but also in the diaspora. An Africana studies phd  wouldn't necessarily be applying for Africanist history jobs. Depending on the research specialty it could be any field.

There isn't one single history job market. The overall picture is not great, but it varies enormously by specialty. So, for example (This has to be ball park because the jobs data starts in 2014 and phd numbers are only available till 2013) there were 177 Phds awarded in European history, but only 66 full time job searches. There were 150 jobs in North America, but  435 Phds. Not good. If you look at the market in other fields however, it is pretty different. 60 asian Phds in 2013 for 50 jobs in 2014. The Middle East actually has more job openings than PHDS most years.

There were 31 PHDs awarded in African history in 2013 and 30 jobs in 2014. Obviously these numbers have gone up and mostly down with the overall job market, but Someone said all the Africanists they knew didn't have jobs, but every Africanist in my graduate program during the time I was there, who finished their phd and applied for academic jobs has a tenure track job right now.

What that means for you, really depends on the specialty. If your research is America focused, history jobs are going to be tough. If it is Africa, the numbers look better, but of course, that's no guarantee. In terms of how your degree will be seen...It really depends. On one hand if you are Africa focused, African History and Africana are often closely connected. Lots of Africanist historians are part of Africana departments. However, since it is a small field, there may not be any African historians involved in the search and people in other specialties might be less inclined to consider someone without a history degree. It also probably depends a lot on who your advisors are and what sort of work you do. If your thesis advisor was a well respected historian in the field that would help for example. There are also scenarios where the interdisciplinary nature of your training could help. A smaller school might want to hire someone who studies Africa, but they might worry that enrollment numbers won't support someone teaching African history courses all the time. A person who has the training to teach courses in other regions, or other subjects could be a plus.

[fourhats]

You're getting a lot of advice, but it isn't very well targeted. I know you know this, but there's a lot of confusion on Africana studies in the comments. Africana studies is a field that studies people of African descent, in Africa, but also in the diaspora. An Africana studies phd  wouldn't necessarily be applying for Africanist history jobs. Depending on the research specialty it could be any field.

Yes, this is correct. There's nothing in the original post to indicate that the OP is necessarily an Africanist. I have led a couple of Africana Studies programs, and actually think that there may be more jobs in Africana than in history. If you sell yourself as someone who does Diaspora Studies within that specialty, you may be better off. I noted several jobs/hires in the past few years, and also in race/ethnic studies. This is going to speak to the changing American demographic.

[jerseyjay]

You're getting a lot of advice, but it isn't very well targeted. I know you know this, but there's a lot of confusion on Africana studies in the comments. Africana studies is a field that studies people of African descent, in Africa, but also in the diaspora. An Africana studies phd  wouldn't necessarily be applying for Africanist history jobs. Depending on the research specialty it could be any field.

This is correct. However, it is also one of the reasons that having an Africana degree might not be the best route to getting a (hypothetical) position in a history department. If the position were for Black History, or African History, or Black Diaspora History, or something that in which your dissertation and research were appropriate, it might work. But then you would have to deal with a SC who would (wrongly) think, this is a U.S. history job, why should an Africanist apply? Or they might think: well, they are qualified to teach the upper level electives, but what about the intro to history, or historiography, etc.

[Caracal]

You're getting a lot of advice, but it isn't very well targeted. I know you know this, but there's a lot of confusion on Africana studies in the comments. Africana studies is a field that studies people of African descent, in Africa, but also in the diaspora. An Africana studies phd  wouldn't necessarily be applying for Africanist history jobs. Depending on the research specialty it could be any field.

This is correct. However, it is also one of the reasons that having an Africana degree might not be the best route to getting a (hypothetical) position in a history department. If the position were for Black History, or African History, or Black Diaspora History, or something that in which your dissertation and research were appropriate, it might work. But then you would have to deal with a SC who would (wrongly) think, this is a U.S. history job, why should an Africanist apply? Or they might think: well, they are qualified to teach the upper level electives, but what about the intro to history, or historiography, etc.

Yeah, it is usually easier to go the other way. I know lots of people with history degrees in interdisciplinary departments, but can't think of too many in history departments with interdisciplinary degrees.

[polly_mer]

Don't listen to the Professor Sparkleponies who have just shown up saying that the situation isn't that bad.

The rosy picture of "several years ago, there were N jobs and N PhDs" seems good, but there's no overview of how that particular job market has changed during a time of great change.  Being highly specialized at something that has almost no demand tends to not work out for people when any sort of blip happens in the market.   

All the other evidence is along the lines of:

* Good people who work hard get jobs. (false, when there aren't jobs)

* You can always fall back on those transferrable skills. (why spend 8 years on a specialization when you can use those transferrable skills now?)

* All the people of whom I can think aren't starving on the streets (This is not evidence of general success of people who put in their time to be specialized, but is more in accord with people who have advanced degrees get some sort of job to pay the bills).

[Caracal]

Don't listen to the Professor Sparkleponies who have just shown up saying that the situation isn't that bad.

The rosy picture of "several years ago, there were N jobs and N PhDs" seems good, but there's no overview of how that particular job market has changed during a time of great change.  Being highly specialized at something that has almost no demand tends to not work out for people when any sort of blip happens in the market.   

All the other evidence is along the lines of:

* Good people who work hard get jobs. (false, when there aren't jobs)

* You can always fall back on those transferrable skills. (why spend 8 years on a specialization when you can use those transferrable skills now?)

* All the people of whom I can think aren't starving on the streets (This is not evidence of general success of people who put in their time to be specialized, but is more in accord with people who have advanced degrees get some sort of job to pay the bills).

Poly, do you actually read the posts before you respond to them? I said none of these things. 

I wish I could find more up to date numbers, but they don't seem to exist for number of PHDs. The number of Africanist jobs in 2018 was down to 19, but the number of history Phds has also been declining. Even if the number of African History PHDs  is still 30, that's a much stronger market than other specialties. It remains true that Africanists have a much better chance of getting jobs.

Also, I'm really sick of the name calling. If you'd like to never see anything I post, go ahead and block me and I'll do the same. I'm just not quite sure why you can't have a civil discussion.

[Wahoo Redux]

Polly is extremely frustrated with anyone is does not share her sense of apocalypse.  Why she comes here, now that she no longer works in academia, I do not know.