Congratulations!

Congratulations to Elisa González-Rivera for winning this year's Arthur A. Ekirch Prize for the best paper in United States History by a Graduate Student for her paper, "Individual Responsibility and Criminal Intent: AIDS, Drug Addiction, and Colonialism in Puerto Rico (1988-1996)," written in Professor Susan Gauss's Seminar in Gender and Globalization.

Congratulations to Camelia Lenart for winning the Sherry Penney Prize. The Sherry Penney Prize is awarded each year to a talented female graduate student who is pursuing a career in History.

Congratulations to both Elisa and Camelia!

read in The Chronicle

Alexandra M. Lord's "Every Ph.D. Needs a Plan B"

Traditionally, graduate programs in the humanities have trained their students to be scholars and teachers. Central to that training has been the teaching assistantship — academe's version of the internship. Graduate students learn how to become teachers through assistantships that are ideally done under the guidance of a mentor. While teaching assistantships have now primarily become a cheap way for universities to pay for instruction, that model of graduate education still holds some validity. In fact, the notion that the more teaching experience you have, the better your chances will be in the academic job market, is so pervasive that graduate students often hold six or more teaching assistantships over their graduate careers.

It's not a bad thing to have multiple teaching assistantships, and it's more than understandable, given the fact that many stipends and tuition waivers are tied to teaching. But when that is your sole job experience, it's worrisome, especially when it comes time to look for a job that does not require a demonstrated ability to teach Western civilization or the American novel.

article of interest

"Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times" NY Times

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.