Hi all,
I'm a history undergrad graduating in 9 months. I want to pursue a career in history and I believe I can succeed in graduate school. I am specifically interested in islamic intellectual history and Ottoman political history.
However, every post on this platform suggests that becoming a history professor is impossibly difficult. Is this true? Do you any of you disagree? Did any of you who graduated recently secure solid positions? Did any of you secure tenure track positions? Perhaps I'm clinging onto false hope but I feel there must be some way to thrive and succeed with a history PhD.
On a related note, what are the most important factors to get hired as a history professor. Is it your PhD program/University? Your department/supervisor? Your publications? Your previous teaching experience? Obviously all are important but which are the most important.
We get questions like this pretty frequently - there was a good discussion a couple of weeks ago: I want to become a history professor, even if its at a CC (community college) but is it impossible?
Honestly at this point it all seems to come down to blind luck. Unless something drastically changes, and I don't see why it would, there's going to be hundreds of people applying for every job. Maybe you'll be the lucky one, maybe not. The only advice we can give almost seems facetious. If you're in the US, my facetious advice is get your PhD from Harvard, otherwise there's barely any point in trying.
Sometimes people also ask what other kinds of jobs you can do with a history degree, so I've got this handy list of jobs that my friends from school have now, if they didn't become professors.
Everything I've heard says that job prospects are bad. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts limited growth for master's-level historian jobs in the next decade. Academic job openings are few and declining rapidly.
I'm not a historian myself, but historian Bret Devereaux has written a long essay recommending against getting a PhD in the humanities. His arguments include that being a graduate student is worse than many people expect; that you may end up with a bad advisor, which makes things much worse; and, of course, that there are no longer good jobs waiting at the end of that road. Also, looking at his blog, he appears to be an excellent scholar and a passionate educator (without this, he couldn't write a blog of that quality) -- and yet, someone of his caliber is unable to find full-time employment in academia. (He works as an adjunct.) It would be good if universities could be convinced to turn back the clock and restore full-time hiring to something approaching pre-2008 levels, but until that happens, I think you are right to be discouraged about the career prospects.
Tenure track positions are extremely competitive, and the chances of you getting one realistically is something you should not expect. You can hope for it, but do not go into a grad program expecting it.
Ask the graduate coordinator and/or chair of the program in your department for advice. Start reaching out to potential supervisors. At this point, it's all on you.
