When Tableau asked a group of recent humanities graduates, “To what do you owe your success in the job search process?” they responded, via e-mail, with honesty and practical advice that came directly from their own experiences. We share excerpts here.
“The job search is daunting and, even when it turns out well, profoundly humbling,” wrote Rachel Eisendrath, AM’10, PhD’12. “There are simply so many qualified applicants and so few positions.
“At the same time as finding a job requires luck, it can also entail something more personal, what one of my codirectors, Bradin Cormack, calls finding the right ‘fit,’” she added. “You’re looking for a place where you can click with a college’s faculty and with an institution’s specific needs.”
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A specialist in sixteenth-century English poetry and prose, Eisendrath obtained a position as an assistant professor of English at Barnard College; she started earlier this fall.
Offering advice for academic job candidates, she reflected, “Instead of becoming more market-determined and anonymous, you can try to step forward as your own thinker in as complex an interaction as possible with a larger community of thinkers working both now and in the past.”
As she finished her dissertation at UChicago—advised by English faculty members Cormack, Michael Murrin, and Joshua Scodel—she wrote, “My committee did an enormous amount. Not only did they help me handle the job search process, but they also, much more importantly, helped me write a project that I cared about.
“Finding a position was not only a scary confrontation with the brutal statistics of our profession, but, within that harsh reality, it was also a continuation of a longer and more human process of trying to come into my own intellectually.”
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Frances Spaltro, PhD’11, followed a different but no less successful path to employment. “I lucked out,” wrote Spaltro, who completed a Classics degree and now teaches Latin at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
Her foray into high school teaching was gradual. In 1999, a Classics Department faculty member referred her to the head of the Latin program at Lab, who needed someone to teach one high school class. “I interviewed, taught a demo class, and got the job,” says Spaltro.
After teaching briefly at San Diego State University, she returned to Lab in 2003 to teach two classes; a year later, “I had three classes and an advisory, and before I knew it, I was coaching Dance Troupe, coordinating senior projects, and becoming involved in the life of the community in all sorts of ways I'd never anticipated. In short, I fell in love with teaching and guiding teenagers and discovered I am good at it.”
Still, wrote Spaltro, “it was difficult to admit that I was no longer interested in a career teaching at the college level, since I had been on that track for some time. There is unfortunately a sense that teaching high school is a step backward or downward, and I had to shake that.
“But I found myself part of a very special community … and in the end the encouragement and support of colleagues, parents, and students made it hard to deny that I was right where I was happiest and most fulfilled.
“I also credit the support of the Classics Department and my committee, since I was teaching full time and writing in the cracks, and their faith in me was enormous. “
Spaltro offered this counsel for current PhD students: “Be open to all possibilities; you may find your greatest satisfaction where and when you did not expect to find it. For those of you beginning to write, still writing, trying to write, and finding yourself at something of a standstill: take the Dissertation Boot Camp and long walks by Lake Michigan.”
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David Alworth, AM’07, PhD’12, is now an assistant professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard. His job search was successful, he wrote, because “I was very fortunate to work with an outstanding group of faculty advisors who devoted considerable time and energy to my intellectual and professional development.”
In particular, UChicago English Department faculty members Bill Brown, Debbie Nelson, and Ken Warren “were patient, generous, and deeply invested in helping me to think as well as I can,” said Alworth.
“In addition, I entered the PhD program with a cohort of brilliant and supportive peers who are now great friends, and their enthusiasm for my work was a tremendous gift that helped to sustain my energy during many arduous periods of writing and revising.”
Alworth’s dissertation, “Site Reading: Postwar Fiction, Visual Art, and Social Form,” argues that authors (such as Don DeLillo, William S. Burroughs, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon) and visual artists (such as Andy Warhol, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, John Chamberlain, and Richard Ross) “turn to sites as a means of re-imagining sociality.
“These authors and artists, I contend, encourage us to see the social as a domain that includes both humans and nonhumans, from foodstuffs and garbage to cars and bombs.”
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A graduate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Elizabeth Urban, AM’06, PhD’12, believes that her job success resulted from her dissertation topic and the “philosophical outlook” that guided it. “Naturally, my dissertation contained a lot of field-specific research and nitty-gritty details that only a few of my colleagues would ever care about,” she wrote, “but from its inception I had also hoped to answer bigger questions and to participate in a wider scholarly discussion. This made my project appealing to people across disciplines.”
Because job candidates are vetted by an entire department and not just the one or two scholars who work on a specific topic, Urban advised students to “find ways to make your project widely appealing and to contribute to the big picture.” Her dissertation, “The Early Islamic Mawali: A Window onto Processes of Identity Construction and Social Change,” focuses on the mawali, foreign converts to Islam (usually freed slaves) who came under the protection of Arab tribes in the seventh to ninth centuries CE.
“They help us understand how outsiders were incorporated into the Islamic community, how they traversed that gray area between belonging and not-belonging, and how they created new narratives of Islamic identity,” Urban explained—which are topics with continuing relevance today.
Urban believes luck was a key factor in landing her current position as a visiting assistant professor in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department at Brandeis University. Originally, she had applied for a tenure-track job at a school in the Boston area, where she was living. “The position would have been a bit of a stretch for me, as it required some experience that I didn’t yet have as a freshly minted PhD,” she wrote.
Urban did not get the job she applied for, but “because I was already in the area, and because they already had my CV on hand, I was able to have a couple quick interviews and was offered the [other] position shortly thereafter.”
She suggested that PhD students gain as much teaching, networking, and interviewing experience as possible—advice that job seekers are accustomed to hearing. But noting that prospective employers “want you to contribute actively to department life,” she also advised graduate students to gain experience organizing events, running workshops, and planning conferences.
“Don't do these things to pad your CV,” she concluded. “Do them because someday you will need those skills to do your job well.”