Roundup: The History and Academic Job Market

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Ryan Cordell, "Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

Last week on my personal research website I published a link roundup, “Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market.” I prepared this list for a job market workshop offered to graduate students in my department. The post was well received both at Notheastern and on Twitter, and I thought ProfHacker readers might also find it useful. While tailored to graduate students entering the market for the first time, I suspect these resources will be useful to others braving the market as well. This could be considered a “From the Archives” post, as I link to many of my ProfHacker colleague’s best posts on the job market.>>>

Gerry Canavan, "Going on the Job Market, ABD -- II," Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

. . . . Don’t assume you can know in advance where you will be competitive. There are so many different factors at work in these things that you can’t possibly predict in advance which departments will be interested in you and which won’t. You just have to apply everywhere.>>>
Stacey Patton, "Stale Ph.D.'s Need Not Apply," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 19, 2012

When Harvard University and Colorado State University recently posted job ads indicating that applicants should be very recent recipients of Ph.D.'s, many people saw the ads as confirmation of something they already suspected about the unspoken hiring preferences for entry-level positions in the humanities.>>>

Gwendolyn Beetham, "Recruitment in academia: is there no room for compassion?" Guardian, September 17, 2012

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in postgraduate degrees, full-time permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. Certainly, to search for work in today's over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task – as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all too well. In such a market, every position opening receives scores, if not hundreds, of applications. With so many qualified individuals for each post, the question arises: how can one ethically respond to unsuccessful applicants?>>>

Allen Mikaelian, "AHA and Employment: Recent Activities Concerning the Job Market and the History Student," AHA Today, September 12, 2012

There’s a possible bright spot emerging in the job market. The October issue of Perspective on History last year included 133 job ads, but this year’s issue will feature 189. This does not in itself constitute a breakthrough, and we should point out that what matters most is how many total ads are placed by the end of the season. Still, we hope that this increase over last year’s numbers is the start of a trend. Over the past year, the American Historical Association has been active in addressing the tough academic job market, the single most important issue faced by history students and recent graduates. These efforts have taken place on several fronts.>>>
 
Cathy, "Help wanted: Thoughts on the recent boom in academic public history jobs," History@Work, September 17, 2012

In recent years, the number of tenure track academic jobs in history has dropped to some of the lowest levels in 25 years. In response, Anthony Grafton, James Grossman and Jesse Lemisch have suggested that historians shift their attentions outside of the ivory tower, with Grafton and Grossman encouraging PhDs to get jobs in public history and Lemisch calling for historians to create new public history opportunities. Meanwhile, as they debated these issues, public history became a hot commodity in the academic job market. In 2008, the number of job announcements rose 27.9 percent and last year the number of postings rose significantly again.>>>