History Professor

History Professors divide their professional lives between two activities that feel quite different in practice but are meant to reinforce each other: teaching students the methods and content of historical inquiry, and conducting original research that advances the discipline's understanding of the past.

In teaching, history professors work at multiple levels simultaneously. A survey course in Western Civilization introduces first-year students to chronological frameworks, primary source interpretation, and basic historical argumentation—the population is large and the preparation is varied. An upper-division seminar on the American Civil War era works with history majors who can handle sophisticated historiographical debates and primary source analysis at a more demanding level. A graduate proseminar on historical methodology introduces PhD students to the field's epistemological foundations. Each level requires different pedagogical approaches and different relationships between instructor and student.

The research side of the job is solitary in ways that teaching is not. Original historical research means spending time in archives—national, state, local, and international depending on the project—working through documents that no previous historian has used in quite the same way to build an argument about what happened and why it matters. The product is typically a peer-reviewed article in a leading journal or, for established scholars and tenure cases, a monograph published by an academic press. The timeline from research question to published book routinely spans five to ten years.

Service to the department and institution absorbs time that junior faculty often underestimate: curriculum committees, faculty searches, tenure and promotion reviews, graduate admissions, and departmental governance. The service burden tends to fall disproportionately on underrepresented faculty who are asked to sit on every committee for diversity visibility. Managing service obligations strategically—taking what matters, declining what doesn't—is a career sustainability skill that takes experience to develop.

Education:

• PhD in history from an accredited doctoral program (required for all tenure-track positions)
• Strong dissertation in an original research area with at least one major archival component
• Language proficiency where relevant to research field (French, German, Spanish, etc.)

Research record at hire:

• For tenure-track positions: dissertation under contract with or submitted to a university press preferred; peer-reviewed journal articles
• For postdoctoral fellowship positions: dissertation defended, revision manuscript in progress
• Conference paper presentations at AHA, OAH, or relevant regional/thematic organizations

Teaching experience:

• Graduate teaching assistantship experience (standard in PhD training)
• Sole instructor experience (visiting, adjunct, or summer teaching)
• Teaching evaluations demonstrating effectiveness across course types

Scholarly specialization:

• Primary research area with depth sufficient for graduate seminar instruction and dissertation advising
• Secondary area for service course coverage (U.S. survey, world history, etc.)
• Methodological breadth increasingly valued: digital history, transnational approaches, environmental history

Professional competencies:

• Grant writing: NEH, ACLS, Fulbright, Mellon, and institutional grants
• Manuscript reviewing: demonstrating engagement with peer review process
• Academic advising: formal advising of majors and guidance for graduate students

Personal attributes:

• Self-direction and resilience: research careers require sustained independent work through periods of rejection and revision
• Intellectual generosity: effective graduate mentorship requires significant investment in others' intellectual development

The academic history job market is challenging and has been for an extended period. Institutional budget pressures, the shift toward contingent labor in higher education, and declining history major enrollments at some institutions have all contributed to a reduction in the number of tenure-track positions advertised annually. The American Historical Association tracks these numbers carefully, and the trends since 2008 have been difficult.

Within this challenging context, specific subfields and institutional types create differentiation. Public history programs at institutions with strong community engagement missions are hiring. Environmental history, the history of capitalism, global history, and digital history are methodologically active areas that attract student interest and departmental investment. Institutions with particular regional or thematic foci—border studies, indigenous history, labor history, African American history—hire specifically in those areas.

The landscape of historical work outside tenure-track positions has become richer than in prior decades. Historic preservation organizations, museum technology departments, digital archives, and public history consulting organizations offer positions that draw on historical training without requiring the academic publication record. State humanities councils, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and documentary production companies hire historians. Lawyers, policy analysts, and government researchers with history backgrounds are valued in those fields.

For those committed to academic teaching, the community college path is viable and in some ways more stable. Full-time community college history instructors have clear professional identities as teachers, reasonable job security at institutions with ongoing enrollment, and the satisfaction of working with students who genuinely need what history education provides: analytical reasoning, evidence evaluation, and contextual thinking.

The advice most senior historians give to prospective PhD students is to enter only if the work of historical research is intrinsically motivating—not as a means to a career endpoint, but as the activity itself—and to develop a realistic understanding of the academic labor market before committing to a doctoral program.

Dear Search Committee,

I am writing to apply for the position of Assistant Professor of U.S. History at [University]. I will defend my dissertation at [University] in March under the supervision of Professor [Name]. My research examines [topic: e.g., labor organizing in the post-Civil War South], drawing primarily on [archive types: e.g., congressional records, newspaper archives, and labor organization papers] to argue [central argument].

My dissertation is under review at [University Press] following a revise-and-resubmit from the editor I worked with during the summer. I have published one article from the dissertation research in the [Journal Name] and have a second piece under review at [Journal Name]. I presented work from Chapter Three at the OAH annual meeting last spring and at a [University] symposium on [topic] in the fall.

I am prepared to teach the full range of U.S. history courses your department offers. During my doctoral training I taught U.S. History Survey I and II as sole instructor of record, a junior seminar on [topic], and cotaught a graduate methods course with Professor [Name]. My teaching evaluations are included in the dossier; the comments I value most consistently note that students feel the course material connects to questions they actually care about.

I am also prepared to teach in your [thematic area] offerings and to develop new courses in [research specialization] once I have established myself in the department.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss my work and my interest in [University].

[Your Name]