Many people who earn PhDs in the humanities go on to work in curatorial and research positions at museums. Others serve as museum educators, grant writers, exhibit designers, digital content developers, among other roles. In addition to their expertise on content, museum professionals use the critical thinking, research, and teaching skills they develop during doctoral training every day in their work.
Curators typically carry diverse responsibilities, from overseeing content, collections, and archives, to giving tours, writing grants, and designing exhibits. They are caretakers of ancient and modern art collections, visiting art and antiquities markets, forming relationships with artists, and handling museum acquisitions. They do research on collections, publish, and present at conferences. Curators also collaborate with their museum colleagues on fundraising, interacting with donors and lenders. Sometimes humanities PhDs found specific collections in museums, serving as principal curators as they incorporate new objects and develop strategies for exhibiting on previously unexplored themes. Their work involves an enormous amount of networking to establish relationships with artists in order to exhibit their work, and with venues that might host traveling exhibitions or loan materials.
Coming from disciplines as broad as Art History, American Culture, and Classical Art and Archaeology, humanities PhDs have found success in museum work, where they use their content knowledge as well as their research and writing skills to create innovative museum programs. When they work outside their areas of content expertise, as they often do in this dynamic profession, they draw upon their highly developed research skills to quickly identify gaps in their knowledge of a new area and endeavor to fill them. The scholarly lens that PhDs refine during doctoral training informs much of what they do as museum professionals in the highly competitive field of museum curation.
Many PhDs enjoy the opportunities for collaboration that come with museum work. They use the storytelling skills they developed as scholars to create interesting visual and textual narratives. They are adept at translating historical knowledge and artifacts into compelling exhibits that both entertain and educate the public. Museums provide opportunities for humanists to deploy their skills and knowledge in a myriad of ways from developing educational content, to public engagement, to grant writing and beyond.