Administrative Post 25

Greetings from the Buckeye State.  I am on yet another research trip.  The last one for the year...I think/hope.  Another posting in the Eight Questions Series comes next week.

Administrative Post 24

On a research trip this week.  New essays to follow shortly.

Blog CXXXII (132): Legal History

Felice Batlan, an associate professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, is the next contributor to the Eight Questions series.  After graduating summa cum laude in history from Smith College, Professor Batlan received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Harvard Women's Law Journal. She clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked at a law firm specializing in securities law and financial markets. She then joined Greenwich NatWest, an international securities firm, as associate general counsel and head of global compliance. She returned to the academic world, completing a Ph.D. in U.S. history from New York University.  Batlan has received awards for both teaching and service at Chicago-Kent.  Before teaching at Chicago-Kent she was at the Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.  She is associate editor and book review editor for the Law and History Review. She is currently finishing her book Gendering Legal Aid: Lawyers, Social Workers, and the Poor, 1863–1960, which explores the history of the development of legal aid in the United States and the significant and unknown role that women played as both providers and clients of legal aid. Here is her essay.

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

As I studied the Eight Questions Series and contemplated my responses, it became clear to me that I am unqualified to discuss the state of the history profession generally. Like many (although certainly not all) legal historians, I am on a law school faculty. In the past, one could be a legal historian possessing only a law degree, but the current standard is that legal historians possess a J.D. and a PhD. One of the wonderful but perplexing factors about being a legal historian is knowing in what field one actually belongs. Legal historians are a strange combination of historian and legal scholar. This is especially the case when one is located in a law school. To be a legal historian in a law school provides significant freedom in determining what one writes about and what methodology to use. The law school legal historian can easily span time periods and geographies and can broadly define what law is and where we even locate law. It also provides one with the ability to write about the past or the present or to do both simultaneously. Yet, there are also tensions and pitfalls. As a historian, one is warned against being too presentist. As a legal scholar, one is asked continually to answer the question of what present norms should be. An even deeper conflict involves how some historians think about law quite differently than legal scholars. For example, I understand law as a particularly powerful discourse which has real and material consequences. I do not, however, believe that there is any objectivity to law or that law or courts somehow stand outside of historical forces. At times, I have been accused of simply writing unquantifiable stories as opposed to doing the real empirical work of the legal scholar. Yet from my training and perspective, I find such empirical work and even legal doctrine to be just another type of story that we tell. What is so wonderful about legal history is how big and encompassing the umbrella can be.

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

Obviously, the university is in a period of transition, which reflects larger economic problems and ideological commitments. The question that we all face is what is the value of higher education, who should pay for it, should universities be producers of knowledge, and what makes knowledge valuable? From the perspective of the law school, legal education always has been pulled between seeing itself as part of a broad liberal arts education or as a trade school. In part (the loaded question is) should we be producing citizen lawyers or simply skilled practitioners. As the market for lawyers contracts, law schools are downsizing. Few law schools are willing to have more than one or two legal historians on faculty and very few legal historians teach only legal history. There are some commentators writing about the future of law schools who believe that a small number of elite law schools will have faculty who produce scholarship and the remainder of law schools will have primarily practitioners as faculty. Like the field of history more generally, legal historians are continually asked to justify the value of teaching legal history to students who will be practitioners.

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

I define myself as a women's legal historian and some truly fascinating and groundbreaking work is being done in this area, especially in connection with the very sophisticated ways in which legal historians are able to combine an analysis of race, class, and gender. Although this may sound like yesterday's news to some historians, this analysis has really come much later to legal history. Some of the most imaginative recent works have been able to blend intellectual, cultural, and social history. I also find it incredibly exciting when scholars are able to find gender in topics that appear to be ungendered such as the history of patent law.

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

My experience within law schools and the wider university is that teaching is not as central as it should be to hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. That universities formally undervalue teaching does not mean that teaching is unimportant to one's own definition of success or how one feel about his or her self on a daily basis. Although my own tenure and promotion is based primarily on my scholarship, having an excellent reputation as a teacher among my colleagues and students is crucial to my sense of success and my own identity. While I prepare for class, I often think of myself as an actor and it is always my job to give the very best performance possible. I believe this to be a sacred duty to my students. Although it is wonderful to have one's scholarship appreciated, meeting former students who can say that I opened up their world to new ideas and ways of thinking is the real reward for me.

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

Legal scholars primarily write for law reviews. The unique aspect of law reviews is that they are student run and students choose the articles that will be accepted. Most submissions to law reviews are not anonymous. If you want to be a legal historian in a law school, publish in the highest ranked law review possible. A number of top peer review journals also exist including Law and History Review. After you have published enough articles to meet tenure guidelines, then turn to a book.

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

Two main factors in terms of early career development are where your doctorate comes from and whom your advisers are. Within the field of legal history, there are a handful of institutions which produce the majority of legal historians. As your career developments, questions of resources (including funding) and the ability to take sabbaticals greatly impacts one's ability to produce scholarship. This is especially true in history where archival work requires funding and the ability to travel. I would also urge new legal historians to begin attending the annual conference of the American Society for Legal History. It is at the ASLH that legal historians physically manifest themselves as a visible community. I would also warn junior faculty not to take on too many committee assignments or outside projects. In other words, be selfish in terms of the time you need for scholarship. It is a real balancing act to build your reputation, be a good citizen of the university and profession, and leave time for research and writing.

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

Like the advice to an actor, dancer, or musician, only enter the profession if you truly love history and if you have a passion for teaching and writing. There is really no other reason to do it. If you are in a program and you are not enjoying it, then seriously think about leaving the program. This does not make you a failure. As with most of life, it has to be about the process and not the endpoint.

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

For legal historians, the law school market has traditionally been better than the history market. In the law school market, it is often useful to market oneself as something other than a legal historian.

Administrative Post 23

Greetings from the road.  The blog is on a holiday while I do more research in the archives.  Return next week for another entry in the Eight Questions series.

Blog CXXXI (131): Eight Questions: Middle Period and U.S. Civil War

The Eight Questions series now turns to the history of the Middle Period and the U.S. Civil War.  Robert Bender is a Wisconsin native who earned a BS degree at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.  He then earned a MA and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas.  His first book was Like Grass before the Scythe: The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmed, 121st New York Infantry, 1862-1864 (2007).  He followed that effort with Worthy of the Cause for which they Fight: The Civil War Diary of Brig. Gen. Daniel Harris Reynolds (2011). His articles and reviews have appeared in the Missouri Historical Review, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Journal of Illinois History. West Virginia History, Illinois Historical Journal, Michigan Historical Review and the Wisconsin Magazine of History.  He has been a member of the History Department faculty at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell since 2002.  Here is his essay:

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

The greatest strength of the history profession is the way it promotes the ability to evaluate evidence and express those assessments in a coherent fashion. The greatest strength of the Middle Period and Civil War field is the way it promotes thoughtful reflections on how much our population, government, and nation have advanced in relation to the fundamental issues that define us as multicultural population (and what areas exist for continued improvement).

 

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

As with all academic fields, there is a trend among politicians to assess education as a commercial product rather than as an intellectual process, and to simultaneously under-invest in educational facilities, equipment, and salaries – supposedly in the name of a balanced budget, but which demonstrate a lack of administrative understanding of pedagogy and assessment. No nation has ever maintained its position in the world through these types of short-sighted policies.

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

Scholarship that explores the Civil War years in a way that blends the social, political, and military events as a cohesive national experience (rather than as phenomenon to be separately investigated).

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

Extremely important, especially given the number of schools that define themselves as student-oriented or teaching-focused. Graduate schools need to do more to prepare their graduates as teachers, not just researchers (i.e. graduate schools need to prepare their graduates more for the immediate job market needs of those graduates; programs with limited numbers of graduate assistantships need to rotate more of their graduate students through that form of teacher-training to improve their chances on the job market).

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

Edit a manageable collection of primary materials for publication; it’s a great way to develop writing and research skills in a project with excellent potential for publication. As much as possible, organize your dissertation in a way that will allow you to initially publish it as a series of related articles.

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

Popularity of field and reputation of alma mater exert the greatest impact on the starting point of a career, because those factors have the most impact on entry-level job market prospects. Factors such as resources and family have greater impact on the balance between life and career, once that career is underway.

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

Be reflective enough to understand why you want to pursue graduate studies and a career in history. Work on your writing skills as much as possible and try to determine your field of specialty as soon as possible.

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

Remember that the skills developed through the study of history are transferrable to many non-teaching fields and public history institutions, such as government agencies or museums and archival repositories.

Administrative Post 22

No posting this week due to a research trip.  Return next week for more.

Blog CXXX (130): Eight Questions: South Asian History

Neilesh Bose, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas is the next contributor to the “Eight Questions” series.  Bose earned a BA from the University of Pittsburgh, a MA from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Tufts University.  At North Texas, he teaches classes in world history, British imperial, and South Asian history.  His research within South Asian history focuses on modern Islam, decolonization, empire, diaspora studies, and theater and performance studies.  His first book, Recasting the Region, Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal, will appear on bookshelves in 2013.  It investigates decolonization, nationalism, and political identity in South Asia as represented and discussed in the literature of critics, writers, publishers, and financiers of the late colonial period.  His articles have appeared in South Asia Research and Modern Asian Studies.  He is currently part of a three-person research team, conducting oral histories of intellectuals born in the era of late colonialism and decolonization. This project has been supported with funding from several sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities. This team is exploring the links between ideas, culture, social experience, and urban geography in the age of decolonization in South Asia.  This work focuses on Bengali-speaking individuals across the divide of India and Bangladesh.  Here is his essay:

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

Risking the revival of an old cliché, I would say that the greatest strength of South Asian history is the sheer diversity of insight contained in the texts and practices of the South Asian past. South Asia’s diversity of classical and modern languages, religions, literary traditions, artistic styles, philosophical traditions, and encounters with the outside world offer the community of historians an unending array of research topics. As a field with so much material to study and learn from, South Asian history also lends itself to intensive debates about theory and methodology. It truly has something for everyone.

The greatest strength of the history profession comprises its ethical and democratic practices. When historians encounter the seemingly distant world of the past, they must infuse their research and dissemination with an ethical concern for the politics and culture of their present-day society. Also, historians are called upon to approach the encounter with humility and honesty, as the profession allows for any reader to check sources, visit archives, and query the historical interpretations, thereby creating a democratic approach to the creation of knowledge.

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

The biggest issue facing South Asian historians working in the United States is the unpredictable and unstable publishing market for specialized historical research. Though the awareness of South Asia as a pivotal region of the world with its own distinctive history is increasing in the U.S. academy, the academic publishing market has not directly followed suit. In a time of economic downturns, South Asian historians must work with grace and imagination to place their work with academic publishers in ways that differ from historians in other fields.

The most important issue facing the history profession is the continual onslaught against humanist and social science education and training in the U.S. Though not a particularly new problem, the relative over-emphasis on fields that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to the detriment of fields like history must be addressed by the community of historians.

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

There are so many interesting and important works that have appeared in recent works that it is difficult to identify one or two particular titles. In general, recent intellectual history in South Asia, with an emphasis on re-assessing the relations between South Asia and the outside world, is particularly exciting. Also, scholarship that re-assesses South Asia’s place within various regional configurations outside of the national or the imperial, such as using oceanic history frameworks, is also charting new vistas in our knowledge of the South Asian past. I think these two strands of current scholarship are important because they consider seriously not only moving beyond familiar national or imperial boundaries of history, but they actually introduce new frameworks that are relevant not only for South Asia but for the discipline as a whole.

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

Teaching is doubtlessly essential to the professional development of an historian. Teaching is what connects you to the field in real time through the rough and tumble world out there, outside of your own idiosyncratic desires. It is not only deeply fulfilling, but a definitive component of being an historian. It forces you to continually connect to the ever-changing audience of students. History as a form of knowledge is a living, breathing entity that is always developing into new directions – without students and the teaching component of our professions, such liveliness would be impossible.

Though the requirements and relative emphasis on teaching vary from institution to institution, each and every institution values teachers who bring to the table sincerity, passion, and commitment. If I were to advise current graduate students, I would recommend not only assisting or fully teaching as much as possible for professional advancement, but also for the personal fulfillment that emanates from working through ideas and intellectual issues and problems with students. Often research ideas and insights arise from teaching experiences. Such experiences, especially at the beginning stages of a career, are invaluable.

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

The scholarly terrain changes quickly, so what is considered “cutting-edge” may change between the start and end of a Ph.D. program. Do what is in your heart but make sure to open your mind to the guidance of those more seasoned in the publishing world than you are. Regarding the dissertation, though the initial audience is small, make sure you cultivate a sensibility for as broad an audience as possible as you develop your ideas and the overall book.

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

There is no magic formula, but unfortunately the profession does work like most others: the name of the alma mater, the reputation of the dissertation advisor, the timeliness and popularity of the research topic all play a crucial role in career advancement. That said, the job market is absolutely unpredictable and it is impossible to identify one factor over all others that would ensure success.

For the first few years of a Ph.D., however, it is crucial to isolate as strong and as marketable a topic as possible. This topic will define you for several very important markers in your career and in many cases will make or break job, fellowship, and publication competitions. This topic also serves as your scholarly identity that will mark your entry into the profession after the Ph.D. Handle the decision about your topic with the utmost consideration. Choose a topic you are comfortable sticking with for several years. Once you are deep into the Ph.D. it will be nearly impossible to change it.

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

I recommend thinking seriously about what the path of a Ph.D. in history and then a career in history entails before taking the plunge. There will be several years of intense work with little renumeration and a serious possibility of not finding a job in the field. All this will take place while friends and colleagues in other professions outside the academy are advancing in their own lives. Jobs and fellowship opportunities are strewn across the country and the world. If one is serious about an academic career, frequent and long-term moves will surely be in your future. If after all these considerations you decide you must do it, I do have a few suggestions.

First, get started on language study immediately. South Asian history is quite exciting but the language requirements are severe and particular, regardless of topic or time period.

Second, get immersed in research experiences in South Asia as soon and as often as possible. Unlike many other fields, doing research in South Asian libraries and archives often includes numerous bureaucratic hurdles and obstacles as well as challenges of many kinds unheard of in other historical fields. There are numerous sources of funding for travel as an undergraduate and as a language student. Get immersed not only in South Asia, but in research in South Asia, as soon as possible. This is the only time you will ever have to ease your way into South Asian research and work life – when you are doing dissertation research and research after your Ph.D., you will find that time is not on your side. Do as much as you can beforehand.

Third, discuss with prospective advisors your potential dissertation and path well before you submit your applications. Ensure that your prospective advisor is committed to your project before you embark on your Ph.D. Talk to current Ph.D. students at your designated institution and at other institutions. Trust me—you will learn from everyone.

All this basically means that you need to prepare accordingly and very early for a Ph.D. in South Asian history. It will likely take a bit longer than you think at first.

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

There are plenty of jobs and career paths for a new Ph.D. unable to find employment in a history department. First, though the academic job market is extremely unpredictable, a few factors are very important for every job search: cover letters, c.v. style, and approaches to interviewing are elements that you should polish and display to both junior and senior colleagues. Make sure to find at least one junior and one senior (tenured) colleague to read all your paper work and listen to your job talk. Also, do not be shy about asking colleagues at other institutions, regardless of rank, about search committee practices and priorities.

With expertise in South Asian history, one is also suited for work in study and travel abroad organizations that specialize in study/travel/language programs in India and other parts of South Asia.

For jobs outside of the university history profession, there are opportunities in K-12 teaching, government agencies (particularly the Office of the Historian of the Department of State), museums, publishing and editing, travel writing, and library science professions. Also, working in advanced administrative professions in the university is another option.