by Jon Lackman | 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?
In subsequent posts, we wrote on which departments landed the most top jobs per graduate, on how the hiring data breaks down by subfield, on the advisors who produce the most job-getters, and on gender equity.
Over the past couple weeks, we reviewed the fate of those 137 individuals and catalogued new members of the assistant-professor club. Here’s what we found:
Of the 137 assistant professors that we originally catalogued, 86 haven’t changed status in the last two years.
Of the 51 who have changed in status, 36 have been promoted to associate professor, while 15 have left their institution. Of the latter 15, five now have new assistant-professor jobs at other top departments.
Sixty-eight new assistant-professor hires have been made at the institutions we study. Seven of the new hires are Yale grads, seven from Harvard, six Columbia, six Princeton, five NYU, four Chicago, three Berkeley, three UCLA, two Northwestern, two Penn, two MIT, two Johns Hopkins, two University of Munich. There’s one grad each from Brown, Bryn Mawr, CUNY, Duke, Emory, IUAV(Venezia)/Sorbonne [joint PhD], London, Oxford, Politecnico di Torino, Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, Stanford (Anthropology Dept), Texas, Toronto, UMASS (Dartmouth), University of East Anglia, and University of Sydney.
Of the 68 new hires, 22 specialize in modern or contemporary topics, ten in Asian art, eight in American and/or Latin American and/or Native American, eight in ancient, six in renaissance or baroque, five in medieval/byzantine, four in African and/or African diaspora. two in Islamic, two in pre-Columbian.
More analysis to come. As always, we invite all suggestions on how to improve our method, which is outlined in the original post.
