Posts with tag Historical Profession

Although I’ve given up on historically professing myself, I still have a number of automated scripts for analyzing the state of the historical profession hanging around. Since a number of people have asked for updates, it seems worth doing. As a reminder, I’m scraping H-Net for listings. When I’ve looked at job ads from the American Historical Association’s website, they seem roughly comparable.

I attended the American Historical Association’s conference last week, possibly for the last time since I’ve given up history professorin. Since then, the collapse of the hiring prospects in history has been on my mind more. See Erin Bartram, Kathryn Otrofsky and Daniel Bessner on the way that this AHA was haunted by a sense of terminal decline in the history profession. I was motivated to look a bit at something I’ve thought about several times over the years: what happens to people after receiving a PhD in history?

I last looked at the H-Net job numbers about a month ago.

Since then, the news isn’t exactly good, but it’s also probably as good as anyone could expect. For most of September and October, history jobs were at about 25% of their average for the 2010s; this was slightly worse than we’re seeing in the approximate numbers in–for instance–science jobs, where new job openings are at about 30% of their normal levels (Thanks to Dylan Ruediger at the AHA for passing along that link.)

Out of a train-wreck curiosity about what’s been happening to the historical profession, I’ve been watching the numbers on tenure-track hiring as posted on H-Net, one of the major venues for listing history jobs.

[Update 10-2: switching to US and Canada only. An earlier version of this included other countries, even though I said it didn’t.]