by Jon Lackman | 13 March 2007 | Career, News
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 define. We invite all suggestions on how to improve our method, which is outlined below and which we will discuss in greater detail in future posts. (Email your suggestions, as well as any other comments, here, and if you don’t want your letter to be published, please say so.) Meanwhile, we hope you agree that our survey already tells an interesting story.
Future posts will break down the hiring data by gender, by subfield, and if possible by PhD advisor. We hope also to add data on departments’ annual PhD output as well as info on non-academic placements (museum curatorships, for example).
Art History Dept. (# of grads w/top jobs)
1. Columbia (15)
2. Harvard (13)
2. Yale (13)
4. UC-Berkeley (10)
5. Princeton (8)
6. U. of Pennsylvania (7)
7. NYU (5)
7. Stanford (5)
7. UCLA (5)
10. Chicago (4)
10. Johns Hopkins (4)
10. Northwestern (4)
13. MIT (3)
14. Brown (2)
14. Courtauld Institute (2)
14. CUNY (2)
14. Delaware (2)
14. Emory (2)
14. Iowa (2)
14. Oxford (2)
14. Rochester (2)
14. UT-Austin (2)
The following had one placement each: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität (Freiburg), UC-Berkeley (Rhetoric Dept.), Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Edinburgh, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Istituto Universitario di Architettura (Venice), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich), U. of Maryland-College Park, U. of Michigan-Ann Arbor, New School, NYU (American Studies Dept.), U. of Pittsburgh, Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Sorbonne, U. of Sussex, U. of Toronto, UCSB, U. of Tübingen, U. of Warwick, and U. of Washington-Seattle.
Assistant professors qualify for our survey if
a) they teach in one of the 1997 Gourman Report‘s top 30 art-history departments,
b) they teach in the art-history department of an institution ranked among the top 25 universities or top 10 liberal-arts colleges in the 2007 U.S. News and World Report survey,
c) or they teach at an institution whose graduates have won two or more of the top jobs defined in a) and b).
We assume that assistant professors are recent hires, since most are promoted or let go within seven years or so. We also assume that department websites are accurate and up-to-date.
