History Departments should care about more history
Oof
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Every year, the American Historical Association releases a report on all jobs advertised through their pages. It’s not quite all jobs, but is by far the best way to get a sense of the profession’s course at a glance.
The news has been bad for a long time, but today we want to focus on this detail. 8% of all of jobs are for the pre-modern world, some 3000 years of human history. What are we even doing here? If History Departments don’t promote and celebrate and demand we study the remote past, who will?
From the report:
Perhaps the most notable statistic in the data from the 2022–23 academic year is the handful of listings seeking historians who specialize in periods prior to 1500 CE (Fig. 4). Of the 465 TT or NTT jobs listed, 341 (73 percent) specifically sought a modernist, 87 (19 percent) were open, and only 37 (8 percent) sought a premodernist. In short, jobs for modernists outnumber those for premodernists by a ratio of 10:1. This finding is in line with a recent follow-up to a 2021 report issued by the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), which found an average of 5 TT job listings for medieval historians each year over the past two years, down from a pre-COVID average of 11 to 13 jobs listed per year. Moreover, a disproportionate number of the AHA Career Center’s listings for premodernists (15 percent) were for senior hires only, further reducing the already tiny number of jobs available to junior scholars. As the MAA report warns, access to full-time faculty positions for premodernists is “a job lottery, not a job market.”
This is written by (friend of Modern Medieval) L. Renato Grigoli, but with respect, we think the next section of this write-up isn’t quite right. Grigoli conjectures (it’s all conjecture! We are also conjecturing!), “Given that most history programs are experiencing decreasing or static enrollments, the desire to hire where students want to learn is understandable…If there is indeed a movement toward hiring purely with teaching classes in mind, that tendency would also explain the relative (and absolute) dearth of jobs for premodernists.”
Here we disagree. In our experience, both ancient and medieval courses tend to enroll quite well, with many students entering History Departments due to pre-acquired affinity for Ancient Greece and Rome or the European Middle Ages. It’s then our job as historians to broaden their perspectives, connecting them both to a bigger interconnected world and to other ways of studying the past. Put simply, in our experience, medieval courses enroll. So while perhaps the perception of student interest is driving the collapse of premodern history (in all fields and parts of the world, even though we’re speaking from our own subfield), it’s just a perception. It seems more likely, though, that faculty and especially administrative priorities are simply concerned with the distant past. Indeed, at David’s university, several terrific historians have been hired by searches that originated outside the department, directly connected to broader university priorities. They are important priorities! But it’s not the only way to hire.
And the situation is worse than it looks.
Last year there were wonderful ancient and medieval European and Mediterranean history jobs in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. A premodernist on the job market cannot afford to overlook these jobs, and yet, the political situation in these states includes the rapid destruction of the rights of women, trans people, other members of the LGBTQ community, an intensification of racist violence, and other forces that would make it impossible, or at least both difficult and scary, to move to those states. So it’s a collapsing field, but also a collapsing field in which the relatively few positions will mostly be filled by the relatively few people who are able to move into a fascist state.
There are no simple solutions. We merely ask our colleagues in our discipline to understand that the collapse of pre-modern history is a crisis requiring redress within your own departments. Fight for premodern lines. Hire one today!
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