Diplomatic Approaches: A Romance Languages PhD purses a path in Italy’s consular service

Dr. Pierluigi Erbaggio

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…

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…

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…

Where do humanists work?: Organizational Profiles

Graduates of humanities PhD programs finish their degrees with wide-ranging abilities in research, communication, instruction, and project management. For students who have spent many years at research-intensive institutions, however, it is can be difficult to imagine contexts outside of the professoriate where they might apply their training. As an assignment for English 630: Professional Humanities…

A Humanities Careers Timeline for the PhD Student

By Matthew Woodbury, Research Assistant, The Humanities PhD Project Among her opening remarks at the University of Michigan’s Career Connections Conference, Dr. Fatimah Williams Castro (Founder and CEO of Beyond the Tenure Track) emphasized the importance of preparation and planning to a successful job search. Instead of waiting for the last semester to consider post-graduation…

Humanities, Communications, and Philanthropy: What I Learned Sharing the Barbour Scholars Story

By Elizabeth Harlow, Doctoral Candidate, English Language & Literature As the University of Michigan commemorated its bicentennial in 2017, one of its most storied programs also marked the major milestone of its 100th anniversary. I spent last summer learning and telling the history of the Barbour Scholarship as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow on the…

UM Career Center Resume and Cover Letter Tips for PhD Students

A new resource for PhDs from UM’s Career Center includes worksheets that can help identify transferable skills and construct narratives that make the skills developed during a doctorate legible to employers. The packet also provides “brief introductions that explain various application materials, reflection tools that can help … articulate your experience, examples of application materials, and, core…

Preparing for Humanities Careers: Suggestions for Doctoral Students and Departments

By Matthew Woodbury, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History As a historian, when asked to explain what I do, one reply is to say I study change and continuity over time. This month that methodological approach takes a personal turn; there are a few changes on my horizon as I reach the final weeks of my…