Blog CXV (115): Eight Questions: Southern History

Jason Phillips is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. He holds a BA in history from the University of Richmond, an MA in history from Wake Forest University, and a PhD in history from Rice University. Phillips works at the intersection of cultural, intellectual, and military history. His first book, Diehard Rebels: The Culture of Invincibility (University of Georgia Press, 2007) explains the deeply ingrained attitudes and wartime experiences that shaped the reality of white southerners who fought to the bitter end, resisted Reconstruction, and embodied the Lost Cause myth. His articles have appeared in numerous journals and essay collections. The Organization of American Historians selected his Journal of Southern History article, titled “The Grape Vine Telegraph: Rumors and Confederate Persistence,” as one of the ten best American history essays of 2008. He is working on a second monograph, Prophecy of Blood: Anticipation and the American Civil War, that studies American forecasts of the war to understand how widespread perceptions of the future shaped collective actions during the conflict and social memory after it. Phillips is also editing a collection of essays, Master Narratives: History, Storytelling, and the Postmodern South, that showcases eleven southernists who work at the intersection of southern fiction and history. In recent years a willingness to see southern worlds that exceed binaries of race, religion, gender, geography, and class has greatly enriched southern studies. Master Narratives begins the difficult task of transcending another rigid dichotomy, modernism and postmodernism. Louisiana State University Press is publishing the book in spring 2013.

 

What is the greatest strength of your field? In the history profession?

Southern history is strong in many ways. As someone who also does Civil War history, I love the chronological breadth of southern history. Civil War historians are embracing the broader era of the war, as evident in the new journal, the Journal of the Civil War Era, but Civil War history is still a blink of time compared to the centuries of southern history. This chronological breadth makes southern history a huge field of diverse historians who are all devoted to explaining the same, enigmatic region. One way southern historians have tackled this challenge is by employing interdisciplinary categories of analysis. The field’s cross pollination with literary studies has always been strong, but more recently, southern historians have borrowed from anthropology and archaeology in fascinating ways. But if I have to select one, greatest strength, I would have to pick the Journal of Southern History. Southern historians are fortunate to have one of the most prestigious academic journals as their own. The Journal pushes the field without succumbing to faddishness and explores the South through a lens that reflects larger historical problems in American history.

For the profession, the enormity of our subject—humanity’s past—places historians in a unique position within academia. Historians work in the humanities, the social sciences, business and economics, engineering and technology, and the natural sciences. We practice an art and a science. Few professions touch as many fields of knowledge. This breadth forces historians to be generalists despite the increasing specialization of academia. Historians who study diverse places, times, and subjects still engage each other professionally, whereas other disciplines have become so specialized that they fracture into sub-disciplines with methodologies and theories that no longer sustain a single disciplinary dialogue.

What is the biggest issue facing your field? The history profession?

For roughly twenty years, scholarship on historical memory invigorated southern history by importing analytical frameworks from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and literary criticism that showed the relationship between social constructions of the past and contemporary power dynamics. Memory gave southern historians a new, more sophisticated way to study not only nostalgia and myth but also race, class, and gender in the region. As an analytical category, memory also connected southern history to trends in new cultural history. Plenty of collective and collected memories of the southern past remain unexplored, but the field has already derived as much energy and momentum from the subject that it is likely to acquire. The biggest issue facing the field is finding a replacement for historical memory that can reinvigorate the field and connect it to burgeoning fields and inquiries across the discipline.

Presentism not only contaminates the questions and arguments that historians articulate, it inflates the importance of the recent past at the expense of older eras. On the job market we see presentism with the proliferation of positions for twentieth-century history and the near extinction of positions for Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern history. Historians are drastically shrinking their own field of inquiry perhaps to prove their relevance in a time when funding for higher education diminishes, but the impact of elevating the history of now above older periods could be disastrous for the profession as a whole. The discipline must support vibrant work that sparks discourse across centuries as well as across the globe.

What is the most interesting work being done in your field? Why?

Southern historians have imported many of the “hot” topics that have energized the discipline in recent years. These trends often stretch the time or space of inquiries, like reconsidering the “long” civil rights movement or viewing the South from a transnational perspective. Other hot topics like southern environmental history seem long overdue but nonetheless offer interesting conclusions by showing how the history of an “exceptional” region relates to the historiography of American environmental history, a field that established its central debates and narrative by focusing first on New England and the Midwest. Recent interdisciplinary work in the field is also very fascinating. Archeological work on plantations and slave markets has provided a new understanding of slave life for example. Works that rely on the digital humanities are showing how southern historians can ask, argue, and share new research through new technologies. Southern historians’ long association with literary criticism and fiction gives them a unique opportunity to challenge the form and not just the content of historiography. James Goodman’s Stories of Scottsboro (1994) still points a way to more sophisticated work on how southerners have grappled with the uncertainty of knowledge. I participated in a conference at the German Historical Institute where historians analyzed uncertain knowledge in American history and many of them set their work in the South.

How valuable is teaching in the professional development of a career?

Teaching experience is a requirement for success on the job market. Most positions in higher education will value teaching as much or more than research, so graduate students need to acquire teaching experience in a variety of courses and formats. Beyond the job market, teaching is valuable for professional development because the craft of teaching hones historians’ ability to tell stories, present arguments, engage historiography, write and revise work, and explore diverse fields.

What direction or type of publishing would you advise a new Ph.D. to conduct?

Publish articles in the top peer-reviewed journals in your field. In southern history, there’s only one—the Journal of Southern History. But if your subfield is chronological or thematic, you could seek publication in those areas as well. Articles in major journals will be read by a wider professional audience than other publications, including essays in anthologies and even your book.

This does not mean that publishing articles matters more than revising and publishing your dissertation. The sequence of publishing articles before the book will increase the quality and quantity of your research. Working with journal editors and referees will sharpen your work before it becomes a book, and well placed articles advertize your forthcoming book to best advantage. Plus, from a practical perspective, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to pull articles out of a book manuscript after it as has been submitted to a press.

What issues affect most the development of a career: family, school resources, popularity of field, reputation of alma matter, etc.?

For historians, the reputation of the alma matter is the least important factor and the others vary greatly for individuals and fields. Family is an independent variable; if you have one or highly value your extended family, the location of a job or the pressures to pay bills can be major factors at the start of your career. If you can postpone having children until you have a tenure track job and are sure you can surpass the standards for promotion and tenure, that’s the safest decision. If not, you’re taking major risks and missing lots of sleep in order to start a career and a family simultaneously. If family is not a major part of your life, school resources and the popularity of your field may determine how, where, and when your career begins.

What advice would you give to an undergrad interested in working on a Ph.D. in history?

If you love history, few career options are more appealing than spending years reading, researching, and discussing the past with great scholars. Start with an MA program to get a taste for graduate school. Even if you don’t continue for a Ph.D., earning the MA will open career opportunities for you. If you’re still interested in working on a Ph.D. after the MA experience, target eight to ten programs that are strong in your field. Contact potential advisors and current graduate students at those programs. Take a test prep course to maximize your GRE scores, because unfortunately those numbers matter. If you’re accepted into a Ph.D. program, pursue the degree only if you receive a fellowship or assistantship from a solid program. If good universities are not willing to invest serious money in your education at this point, your chances of eventually succeeding on the job market may be slim. You should not consider going into major debt to earn a history Ph.D. Even if you get a good job after graduate school, your salary will not erase that debt.

What advice would you give to a new Ph.D. unable to find employment in a history department?

Everyone who finds a job in a history department has a losing record on the job market, so try to stay positive. There are many rewarding careers available to a new Ph.D. in history. Archives, museums, publishers, foundations, secondary schools, the government, and a host of other employers seek professionals with the skills that a new Ph.D, has mastered in graduate school. Consider all your options instead of fixating on a standard academic career.

If you still want to work in a history department, there are many ways to stay professionally engaged while hunting for a job (teaching whatever courses you can grab, participating at professional conferences, applying for post-docs and grants), but the best thing you can do is publish. And not all publications are equal. As I pointed out above, you should publish articles in the top peer-reviewed journals in your field. Find courses to teach to pay the bills and hone your pedagogy, but don’t assume that teaching will be viewed as proof that you are still engaged in the profession. The surest way to demonstrate professional development and activity is by turning the strongest chapters of your dissertation into articles at major journals. Don’t undersell your work by submitting it to obscure journals or small anthologies; once you’ve published those gems you can’t submit them to better journals.

Meanwhile, stay ready and strengthen your application. Share your cover letter with people who have recently succeeded on the market for advice on how to make it stronger. Review your teaching portfolio and writing sample. Reconsider who is writing letters of recommendation for you. You need a strong letter from your advisor, so keep him/her updated on your work—you want that letter to be current. Strengthen your relationship with other scholars by building new professional relationships and seeking new references. One of these relationships might get you a job in a history department; academia can be a small world after all. Work on your interviewing skills. Practice your job talk in front of an audience, and schedule mock interviews with colleagues and mentors who are willing to help. If those are not options, interview yourself in the mirror to polish your oral expression. Once you’ve gone the extra mile and done everything in your power to strengthen your application, you can face the fate of the job market with the comforting thought that you have done everything you could.

Blog CXIV (114): Eight Questions: Japanese History

The next contribution in the Eight Questions series comes from Greg Smits, an associate professor of
 history and East Asian studies at The Pennsylvania State University.  Smits recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, his MA from the University of Hawaii and his BA from the University of Florida.  Before arriving at Penn State, he taught for five years at Eastern Washington University.  Smits is the author of Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics, which has been translated into Japanese.  He co-edited the anthology Economic Thought in Early-Modern Japan.  He has had articles published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Social History, and the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.  He has also published articles in Japanese-language academic journals and newspapers, including Okinawa Bunka Kenkyu [Journal of Okinawan Culture]. He is currently writing a book about the cultural reaction to earthquakes in Japan.
 

How valuable is teaching in the professional development of a career?

Teaching is always valuable, but the precise role/value depends on the nature of the institution. Teaching is the most important component of a career at liberal arts colleges and smaller regional colleges and universities. At research 1 institutions, of course, research and publishing constitute the most important aspect of a career, though teaching still matters a great deal. So graduate students should take every opportunity to hone their teaching skills as early as possible. No matter where one may end up, good teaching is essential.

What direction or type of publishing would you advise a new Ph.D. to conduct?

This question depends on the nature of the institution. At a research 1 university, the first book should be a specialized monograph and it should be out in 4 years or less. By the 6th year (tenure time), it is often essential to have published a couple of articles from a new project to demonstrate that more is on the way. On the other hand, other types of institutions may look more favorably on publishing articles or books that can be used profitably in the undergraduate classroom. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to put out an academic monograph, if at all possible, regardless of the institution, to set the stage for a future move if that becomes desirable.

What issues affect most the development of a career: family, school resources, popularity of field, reputation of alma matter, etc.?

Determination and willingness to keep his or her nose to the grindstone is perhaps most important. Avoid becoming involved in campus politics, large amounts of committee work, etc., and focus on teaching and research. For getting that first academic, job alma matter matters more than it should, and the topic of one’s research matters a great deal—probably more than it should. Selecting an obscure topic as a graduate student will be a major hindrance in landing a job. So, if it can’t be avoided, the trick is to hitch an otherwise obscure topic to a more popular trend.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, having “a life” that has nothing to do with academia is great for maintaining sanity. Volunteer work or a serious hobby, for example, can function this way. Even though there is an opportunity cost in terms of time and energy, regular participation in something completely unrelated to one job an university settings can actually result in greater productivity and all around happiness.

What advice would you give to an undergrad interested in working on a Ph.D. in history?

My advice in all cases: Don’t do it! I have PDFs of “100 reasons not to get a PhD”-type articles I sometimes send to bolster my point.

What advice would you give to a new Ph.D. unable to find employment in a history department?

Assess your skills and knowledge, figure out what else you can do with them, and pursue every possible career path. Most important, do not join the ranks of untenured (often so-called “part-time”) instructors.

Blog CXIII (113): Eight Questions: Canadian History

Nic Clarke received his Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa in 2009. He is a sessional instructor at both the Royal Military College of Canada and the University of Ottawa.  His research primarily focuses on the history of disability in Canada. His current work explores the different perceptions of martial ability and disability held by lay people, the medical profession, and the military during the 1910s. He is using Canadian Expeditionary Forces enlistment papers and service records as a means to identify common health problems afflicting Canadians.  It is the first study to provide a detailed description of the mechanics of the Canadian Expeditionary Force medical examination, the evolution of physical standards for service, and the increasingly complex categories of fitness developed by military authorities as the Great War continued.  He has had articles published in The International Journal of the History of Sport, First World War Studies, Canadian Military History, Histoire Sociale/Social History and BC Studies.

What is the greatest strength of your field? In the history profession?

“Canadian History” is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of fields of historical research that are founded on the experiences of the myriad peoples that have lived (and continue to live) within the boundaries of Canada. As a result, the field of Canadian History is not only vibrant, but also constantly expanding into new and exciting areas of research. In relation, the growth of interdisciplinary studies—such as the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure—that ally historians with other academics have provided important new approaches, viewpoints, and tools for the study of Canada’s past.

What is the biggest issue facing your field? The history profession?

The biggest issue—and this has been developing for some time—is the ever increasing devaluation of the discipline of history. Historians must shoulder some responsibility for this reality. Too often we have been content to keep our research within the guild, rather than engaging with the wider public. As a result, large sections of the public have little idea of what we do. Concomitantly, the profession is facing a general devaluation of academia, especially in the field of the Arts. This is evinced in Canada by the belief—held by a number of different sectors—that academic research must be utilitarian or have direct commercial applications. Few of the people who hold this belief see Canadian History as utilitarian beyond, perhaps, a vague idea that Canadians should know some ‘important’ dates, individuals and events from Canada’s past. This position both overlooks the fact that historical research has multiple utilities outside the ‘ivory tower’, and negatively impacts on the support provided to the discipline. Take for example: (1) the Government of Canada’s announcement in the 2009 Federal Budget that “[s]cholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [were to be] focussed on business-related degrees”; (2) the slashing of the Council’s budget by $14 million in 2012 Federal Budget; and (3) the repeated funding cuts to Library and Archives Canada –Canada’s national library and archives.

What is the most interesting work being done in your field? Why?

All of it! I am constantly amazed and enlightened by the myriad different studies—ranging from work on Canada’s First Nations through explorations of childhood to reinterpretations of Canada’s experience of the two world wars and beyond—that are sprouting in the field of Canadian History.

How valuable is teaching in the professional development of a career?

I would argue more valuable than most people realize – even though our profession lives by the mantra of “publish or perish”. Members of history departments are, as a general rule, expected to teach. Hiring committees look at teaching experience when vetting candidates for positions. In some cases short-listed candidates’ teaching skills are directly tested by hiring committees. Therefore, a strong teaching dossier and extensive teaching experience can greatly aid one’s quest to gain a position.

More generally, teaching provides you with assets that can be employed in your professional life far beyond the classroom. For example, the information presentation skills (and confidence) one gains from lecturing undergraduate students can be leveraged when presenting conference papers, public lectures, and media interviews. You can also gain important new insight into your own research when preparing lectures or discussing material with students. Many academics learn as much from their students as they teach them.

What direction or type of publishing would you advise a new Ph.D. to conduct?

Book, book, book! Rightly or wrongly, many hiring committees tend to look much more favourably on those candidates with a book or a manuscript than on those candidates without one. This does not mean that you should stop publishing articles (especially if you are publishing them in well-regarded journals), going to conferences, or teaching (all of which are valuable assets in the job hunter’s quiver). Rather, you should focus your energies to ensure you get your manuscript completed as quickly as possible.

What issues affect most the development of a career: family, school resources, popularity of field, reputation of alma matter, etc.?

This is a very difficult question to answer because the issues that influence—both positively and negatively—one’s career development vary from individual to individual. Even when two individuals face the same issues, those issues can have widely disparate affects on their careers depending on a wide variety factors (down to, and including, the temperament of said individuals). That said, I will comment on the question of one’s alma mater and family.

While having completed your Ph.D. at a highly ranked institution can not hurt your career, ultimately it is your contributions that will carry more weight and get you noticed. In other words, your actions will influence your career development more than the institution from which you gained your Ph.D.

I have two small children and I would be lying if I said they did not impact on the time I have available to write and research. However, I believe the benefits of family far outweigh the disadvantages. The support from a partner, children, and wider family provide cannot be overvalued, nor can the fact that they stand as a constant (and at times loud) reminder that there is more to life than your research. Both the support and the reminder are immeasurably important to career development. Family support will help you through the evitable tough times you will face as you travel down the rocky road that is an academic career. The reminder will save you from burnout.

What advice would you give to an undergrad interested in working on a Ph.D. in history?

Make sure that you know what you are getting yourself into. Doing research for your Ph.D. will not be the history equivalent of The Big Bang Theory. While you will have fun and meet a lot of interesting people, you will also do a heck of a lot of work, most of which you will conduct by yourself. (That is not really shown on TBBT, now is it?) Doing a Ph.D. can be very lonely, not to mention frustrating and alienating. In all likelihood many of your friends and family will not understand what you are experiencing, no matter how hard they try. A few of them might also question the value of what you are doing altogether. Others will wonder why you cannot just finish this “Ph.D. thing” in a year or so. In relation, doing a Ph.D. can place significant stresses on your relationship with your partner. I was very fortunate to have a very supportive wife. However, our relationship was still negatively affected by my (ultimately successful) attempt to complete all my coursework and comprehensive studies in a year and a half. We barely saw each other.

Do not expect to gain a tenure-track position immediately after gaining your Ph.D. While some lucky individuals do graduate from Ph.D. straight into a tenure-track position—and I know one of them—most people do not. Expect to be unemployed or underemployed for sometime. Also expect, if necessary, to work outside your field altogether.

What advice would you give to a new Ph.D. unable to find employment in a history department?

First, do not get down hearted and do not give up. The current economic climate is tough and that fact, combined with the large number of new Ph.D.s being minted every year, means that competition is fierce. As such, you have to expect rejections, and often quite a few of them (I’ve had 20+ so far). Keep building your academic dossier with publications and—if possible—part-time teaching gigs. Sure it is not the tenure-track position we all dream of, but a well-developed dossier helps you get on track to gaining such a position. Second, be honest with yourself. Do you really want to work in academia? Both public and private employers highly value the research, analysis, writing skills, and experience that you have. Often the jobs these employers are looking to fill with someone with your skill set pay well and provide intellectual challenges (and, therefore, job satisfaction). Importantly, taking such jobs does not require you to completely divorce yourself from academia. You can still research, publish, and teach. Sure this work will be conducted on your own time, but it leaves the door open for a return to academia – often with valuable new skills and knowledge– should the right position come along.