17 March 2010 | Career
The “CV Doctor” at The Chronicle of Higher Education has returned and last December ministrated to a soon-to-be-minted art-history PhD who fields two CVs, one for academic jobs and another for nonacademic jobs. “Lucy Scholar,” who specializes in Chinese art, is “applying for tenure-track faculty posts at small teaching universities, and for postdoctoral fellowships at [...]
2 March 2010 | Career
The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments”: The teaching work force in the humanities is tilting more and more toward the nontenured … Survey results indicate that a low turnover rate among faculty members, combined with hiring freezes at many institutions, mean fewer academic career opportunities for graduate [...]
2 February 2010 | Career
As the College Art Association conference approaches (Feb 10-13, in Chicago), the unemployed and the underemployed spell-check their CVs, oil the squeaks out of their voices in mock interviews, and iron their professional-yet-scholarly formal wear. What are their chances this year? The CAA has released a few statistics. Job listings for art historians declined 14.3% [...]
17 November 2009 | Career
Michael Bérubé wrote recently of the job market in modern languages; job-seeking art historians may find considerable ground for commiseration: It’s that time of year again, only worse. The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some [...]
9 February 2009 | Career
Let’s crunch the numbers a bit more. Large departments naturally win more jobs, so let’s see who performed best over the last couple years relative to how many people they graduate. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton win out, each winning a number of top jobs each year roughly equal in size to one-third of an annual [...]
5 February 2009 | Career
Two years ago, we wrote Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs? [...]
27 January 2009 | Career
For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice: Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter. “Last year, about a quarter of the positions I [...]
23 January 2009 | Career
Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog: In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of [...]
12 December 2008 | Career
In the Wall Street Journal, we read that according to “a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc.,” art-history majors have a median starting salary of $35,800. Ten years after graduation, their median salary is $64,900. In that respect, they beat majors in anthropology, biology, criminal justice, drama, [...]
9 May 2008 | Career
An article in Die Welt examines the job prospects for German art historians: Currently around 800 unemployed [art historians] are registered at the federal employment agency. That is almost a whole year’s worth of art-history graduates, given that, of around 11,000 students of this field, around 900 conclude their studies each year.
21 February 2008 | Career, Conferences
Karla, completing a dissertation on Czech Surrealism, writes: I have reached the architecturally unexpected city of Dallas and am trying to get myself into full College Art Association mode. I’ve always enjoyed CAA in the past, but this year it’s more of an effort. It is kind of difficult to enjoy much of anything to [...]
Of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, 95 are women. That’s 69%. For comparison, about 75% of art-history PhDs produced this decade have been women. It’s hard to say much about the hiring patterns of individual schools, given the small numbers involved. The most significant examples we could find were these: all six of [...]
Are there professors whose students fare especially well on the job market? Here the data starts to run thin. Few professors advise large numbers of dissertations at a time. That said, we tried to see what we could find. We tracked down advisors for 121 of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, and present [...]
How does the hiring data break down by subfield? Who’s getting the most jobs for modernists? For medievalists? Getting answers here is complicated by the fact that there’s no one accepted way to subdivide the field, nor do all art historians fit neatly into one category. We took our best shot. We also found it [...]
To put our survey findings better in context, it helps to compare departments’ placement numbers with the number of PhDs they award each year. Relatively good data is available via Dissertation Abstracts. We counted up doctorates for each department having more than one top placement in our survey. Art-history Dept. (PhDs granted per year, ’99-’05) [...]
Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs? “Top jobs” are hard to [...]
22 February 2007 | Career, Conferences
Blogger Franklin Einspruch writes on the CAA job fair: “To Prairie Dog Technical College, thank you for thanking me as I picked my package back up. You showed class. To Dastardly Beaver University, who seemed pained to take it in the first place, I have noted your snotty avoidance of eye contact for future reference [...]
19 February 2007 | Career, Conferences, Contemporary
Blogger Jeffry Cudlin writes: “One of the more popular panels of the conference was held on Saturday. ‘A Faustian Bargain? Emerging Artists, Critics, and the Market’ consisted of the usual hand-wringing about art fairs and the diminished role of criticism — but it also featured Jerry Saltz … ‘I don’t think that any artist wakes [...]
15 February 2007 | Career, Conferences
A woman walks up to conference representatives near the job-interview area. She has a question. “So how do I apply for jobs?” “Well, I would suggest going online, then emailing your resume to …” “I don’t have an electronic copy of my resume.” “Oh.”
19 January 2007 | Career, Conferences
As CAA’s annual carnival of job seeking approaches, it’s worth looking at a few statistics. A recent search of CAA’s website showed 106 full- and part-time art-history teaching jobs available. According to our analysis of data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. has minted about 200 new art-history PhDS each year [...]
