In this post, Dr. Kristina Markman and Dr. Michael Ryan discuss what role departments have in preparing students for humanities careers. Dr. Markman and Dr. Ryan emphasize the importance of what language departments use when discussing non-faculty trajectories, addressing a perceived “stigma” attached to employment outside the professoriate, and the need for students and departments…
Category: Faculty Resources
Promising Practices in Humanities PhD Professional Development
This report presents findings from the 2016-2017 Next Generation Humanities PhD Consortium that is useful for faculty and administrators interested in professional development. Funded by the NEH and facilitated by the Council of Graduate Schools, the document outlines lessons learned, suggests some practices encouraging career diversity, and includes some ideas about how to go forward…
Professional Humanities Careers Syllabus
Developed to build student awareness about the variety and range of career opportunities open to humanities doctoral students, this course – Professional Humanities Careers – from the University of Michigan’s David Porter and the MLA’s Stacy Hartman encourages students to “actively and holistically chart their own professional pathways both inside and outside of the university.”
University of Washington New Graduate Seminars in the Humanities
As part of the University of Washington’s four-year program Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics, faculty fellows in the humanities are developing new courses that have a significant public-scholarship component. Though public engagement is only one way to think about redesigning graduate coursework, the course descriptions available here provide some food for thought.
Next Steps for Career Diversity: Diving into Graduate Education
In the December 2017 issue of Perspectives, the American Historical Association’s news magazine, Executive Director James Grossman discussed next steps for the AHA’s Career Diversity Initiative. An overarching goal for the AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians Initiative is addressing discrepancies between what is taught in history doctoral programs and the work that history PhDs actually…
How to Mentor Graduate Students for Non-traditional Jobs: Advice from the Career Center
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Clarence Anthony, a career coach at the University of Michigan Career Center, has a wealth of experience working with humanities doctoral students who are considering and pursuing non-traditional employment. As experts in their disciplines, Michigan faculty have a good grasp of how to prepare graduate students for roles in the academy.…
Quick Start Guide for Faculty Mentors
Wondering how to effectively mentor students if your knowledge of careers outside the professoriate is limited? We put together a Quick Start Guide for our website. It provides guidelines on how to begin conversations with your students on professional development.
Walking the Career-Diversity Walk
This Chronicle of Higher Education article asks faculty to consider the unconscious biases and assumptions that often shape their attitudes about what constitutes a legitimate or respectable career path for a person with a PhD. As long as this perception endures, the author argues, attempts to reform doctoral programs to support diverse career outcomes will face…
Fixing Our Job-Market Problem
A new article from Chronicle Vitae discusses important considerations for doctoral programs going forward: “There is no reason that strategic preparation cannot coexist with the intensive intellectual commitment of Ph.D. study. Indeed, those two things must work in tandem if Ph.D.s are going to be in a position to use their knowledge and training for…
Doctoral Student Career Planning Guide for Faculty
The Modern Language Association’s Connected Academics program has developed an excellent guide to help faculty members broaden the reach of their mentoring for doctoral students. While the guide was created for faculty in English and other modern languages, it offers useful advice for all humanities faculty who seek to improve the quality of their mentoring…