By Lucy Smith, Doctoral Student in History and Women’s Studies Jean – Antoine Houdon, the Parian sculpture, traveled to Mount Vernon in 1785 to cast a bust of George Washington. The life like and iconic Houdon Bust remains to this day at Washington’s ancestral home and became a familiar sight throughout my 3 years…
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The Humans of the Archives
By Alex Honold, Second year PhD student in Education Studies with a focus in history education and learning technologies. Before coming to the University of Michigan, I taught high school US history and world geography. One of my favorite parts about teaching was introducing students to dramatic and thought-provoking primary source materials–diaries, oral histories,…
Expanding the Archive: Building a Digital Archive at the Arab American National Museum
By: Meryem Kamil, Doctoral Candidate, American Culture “Take the banana, put it in a vat of rice overnight, and then use a hair dryer, and all the spots on the banana will disappear.” It’s a lunch break at the Arab American National Museum, and one of the staff is telling us about an internet prank…
Diplomatic Approaches: A Romance Languages PhD purses a path in Italy’s consular service
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Pierluigi Erbaggio received his PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Michigan in 2016. He is an Administrative Assistant at the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, MI. He spoke as part of U-M’s PhD Connections: A Career Conference in April 2018 and agreed to share some more perspectives about his own…
A Classical Studies PhD follows her love of teaching
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Jacqui Stimson received her PhD in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017. She is a Postdoctoral Teaching Consultant at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Education Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Stimson doesn’t have a typical day at the office. After just one year consulting at Carnegie…
Teaching Career Diversity Through Informational Interviews
The content and format of career diversity within humanities departments follows no single model. As curriculum committees and graduate program chairs consider whether or not to make coursework or training mandatory, where to situate it within the arc of the program, and how to connect students with resources beyond the unit or department, it…
Humanities for All
A project of the National Humanities Alliance, the Humanities for All database showcases “higher ed-based publicly engaged humanities initiatives, presenting a cross-section of over 1400 undertaken over the past decade from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.” Projects are organized by discipline, theme, geography, and type of institutional and community partners. There’s…
Where Historians Work
Created by the American Historical Association, this database of 8,515 historians who graduated from US universities between 2004 and 2013 “provides the fullest picture of PhD careers available for any discipline.” The tab displaying information for careers beyond the professoriate is particularly interesting. It details the occupations – ranging from a single “pest control officer” to…
Synthetic Thinking: An archivist’s journey from dinosaurs to Du Bois
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Robert S. Cox is Head of Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2002. Dr. Cox began his PhD to learn about the past. Initial training as a paleontologist, however, meant that the materials he consulted were…
Mobilizing the Humanities for Diverse Careers
This piece from Anne Krook encourages humanities graduate departments to focus “on two problems whose fixes are within our own control.” She identifies the problems as as, first, training “students in too narrow a range of dissertation lengths and types” and second “most often implicitly and explicitly devalu[ing] non-academic job outcomes.” Departments and advisers…