Guest Post: Why and How You Should Build a Web Presence

September 21, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Academia, Guest Posts, Technology Tags: academia, advice, blogging, careers, Historical Profession, Job Market, online presence, professionalization 3 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Lindsay M. Chervinsky. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis and is completing her manuscript, “The President’s Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.”

As the new school year starts, many departments are offering seminars for their graduate students on skills and approaches to find a job in this difficult market. Editorials on ChronicleVitae and the American Historical Association mission to document where historians work demonstrate that the history community is beginning to welcome “non-traditional” employment opportunities. While these efforts represent a great first step to introducing students to jobs in editing, public history, and teaching, I would argue that there should be a broader conversation about learning to create a public voice and building a web presence.

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Where Historians Work: The View from Early America — Welcome to the Series!

May 24, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in Public History, Special Features, Where Historians Work Tags: advice, alt-ac, Alternate careers, American Historical Association, Archives, career diversity, curation, historic preservation, Historical Profession, jobs, libraries, museums, Opinion 5 Comments

PhD graphic In February 2017, The Junto sent out a call to historians working outside the professoriate to join us in a conversation about career diversity for early American history PhDs.[1] The response was exciting and full of interesting conversations with curators, scholars, archivists, librarians, and public historians who have chosen to pursue their passion for research, writing, and teaching in a variety of settings and occupations.

Starting tomorrow, and over the coming weeks, The Junto will feature Q&A’s between Columbia University PhD candidate and Public Historian Katy Lasdow, and a range of participants.

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Where Historians Work: A View from Early America

February 2, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in Academia, Public History Tags: advice, AHA, Alternate careers, Database, Job Market, Opinion, Public History, Technology 1 Comment

Recently the American Historical Association published Where Historians Work: An Interactive Database of History PhD Career Outcomes, “the only interactive, discipline-specific, and cross-institutional database of career outcomes for PhDs.” Using data collected from AHA directories and on the web, “Where Historians Work” presents a robust statistical overview of the varied employment sought by History PhDs from more than 30 degree-granting intuitions. For those historians who have long held positions outside of the academy, the database, part of the AHA’s broader Career Diversity for Historians initiative, is a welcome acknowledgement of what many have known anecdotally for years: History PhDs can—and do!—work in an array of fields.

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Seeking Sabbatical Advice

September 7, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in Academia Tags: advice, Book, Early Career Researchers, Editing, First Book, Leave, research, Sabbatical, writing Leave a comment

edits It’s a fun time for me to be a Juntoist. I joined the blog while I was ABD, on the brink of defending my dissertation. I had thoughts about research and writing, many untested theories about teaching, and opinions about where historians needed to eat when visiting archives in different cities. This was a blog for junior early Americanists, and I didn’t think too much about how the blog would grow and evolve over the next several (!) years. Definitions of junior scholars (“early career researchers” here in the United Kingdom) vary across the UK. The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s definition is someone within eight years of the PhD or within six years of their first academic appointment. Within my faculty, ECRs include “level 4” staff within four years of being hired or recently hired. Thus when I passed my probation, was promoted to level 5, and became a permanent member of staff, I became a non-ECR by my faculty’s definition but still eligible to apply for AHRC ECR funding and funding from other schemes.[1] All this is a long way of saying that I’m a Not So Early Early Career Researcher™ about to embark on her first sabbatical, and would like your advice about how to approach this period of leave. Continue reading →

Promoting Your Book

February 3, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Academia, Publishing Tags: academia, academic publishing, advice, Publishing 1 Comment

Historiography Historian Thomas Kidd recently published some suggestions on the dos and don’ts of promoting your academic book. His recommendations, which included suggestions of not joining social media just for the purpose of promoting your book was good. My aim here is not to repudiate Kidd, but rather to add my own thoughts. Since the content of The Junto is written primarily by early career scholars, I thought I might also contribute some points that may be self-evident to more senior historians, but perhaps less obvious to those who are newer to the field. This advice is also mainly geared towards those who publish with academic presses. Trade publishers function differently.