Hi everyone! I am starting my MA in History this fall. I had gained admission with a topic on Early Medieval visual culture and found a supervisor as well. I actually wanted to focus on High/Late Middle Ages but my university did not have a supervisor for that period. After reading up, I decided that since I can't do H/L Middle Ages, I might as well do the 19th century which I am also interested in. I have a meeting with an advisor but wanted to ask this reddit as well.
For any of you who have academic history, how did you decide your topic? I am just scared that I would have to focus on what I pick for my whole career. I am interested in pretty much all of history and would like to know how you guys picked specializations. If I do the 19th century for my MA, can I go on to specialize in the H/L Middle Ages once I go to a university that offers that? Thanks and sorry if this sounded like rambling. I just want some good advice before making a decision.
You definitely can change your speciality. In fact, I had colleagues in my cohort who did a masters in a different field, such as anthropology. I would guess that this is getting a bit rarer as programs start to really focus on shortening the time to finish degrees. For example, I was one of the last people my department accepted without a masters. In any case, there might be som advantages to doing a different specialty in your masters. You always need to have some sort of comparative field. I did late medieval, and my comparative was early modern. Having more of a modern comparative could make you more employable. It could also change your perspective, or, hey, maybe you like 19th-century history better and you just don’t realize it yet!
The drawback to doing this is the current state of graduate school. You will not receive enough guaranteed funding to finish your project at most schools. My experience was I received 5 years of guaranteed funding when 6-8 years is the norm. You will need to scrape something together. Now, If you didn’t have a masters, you took three years of coursework; if you had a masters, you took two years. This means that you had an extra year to write your dissertation. Even with that extra year, it can be very hard to finish in that time. The thing to consider is, if your masters project is essentially a glorified version of a PhD project proposal, you will be in much better standing to get into a program as cohorts get smaller and smaller, and you will already have a platform to build on when you actually go to your dissertation.
My advice would be that if you are dead set on trying academia, sit down with a young professor who has been on the job market recently and try and feel out which specialization will benefit you the most on the job market. Others might tell you to pick something that you love since the market is bad for everyone. But when it was time for me, there were three new tenure track medieval historian jobs in the United States, and it was pretty clear that they wanted a classicist who could do medieval stuff too. This was pre covid, and from what I understand, it’s only gotten worse. I find it unlikely that academia will recover from this, because it’s a very inelastic industry in term of responding to change from outside and actually standing up to university administration.