History Professor Job Description

A history professor is a college or university faculty member who teaches the human past and the craft of interpreting it, and who at many institutions also publishes original scholarship. The federal occupational system files the job under History Teachers, Postsecondary, a category that covers people who only teach as well as those who split their time between the classroom and the archive.

The teaching load sets the rhythm of the week. A first-year survey such as U.S. History to 1877 or a world history sequence can seat a large lecture hall, with graduate teaching assistants running discussion sections and grading blue books. Upper-division courses shrink to seminars where majors read historiography, argue over interpretations, and write papers built on primary sources. At doctoral institutions the professor also runs graduate colloquia, sits on qualifying exam committees, and supervises dissertations from prospectus to defense. Course materials live in a learning management system such as Canvas, Blackboard Learn, Moodle, or Sakai, and much of the grading happens there too.

Assignment design is where the craft shows. A good history assignment asks students to work with evidence a chatbot cannot fake well: a box of digitized letters, a run of county court records, a newspaper series pulled from Chronicling America at the Library of Congress. Professors build these exercises so that students practice sourcing, contextualizing, and corroborating documents rather than summarizing a textbook.

Research is the second half of the job and, at research universities, the half that decides promotion. A project usually starts with a question and a set of collections: a presidential library, a state archive, a church register, a corporate records deposit, or holdings abroad that demand reading knowledge of another language. The historian reads, transcribes, and takes notes, often managing citations in Zotero, then turns that work into conference papers, peer-reviewed journal articles, and eventually a monograph with a university press. Grant applications to bodies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright program pay for archive trips and release time.

Service fills whatever hours remain. Faculty sit on curriculum committees, hiring committees, and tenure reviews; they advise majors on course sequences, honors theses, and graduate applications; and they referee manuscripts for journals and presses. Many also do public-facing work: museum exhibit consulting, oral history projects, teacher workshops, op-eds, and expert testimony on historical questions in court or before legislatures.

The title covers a range of appointments. An assistant professor on the tenure track is building a case for permanent appointment. Associate and full professors hold tenure and carry heavier service and mentoring loads. Lecturers, instructors, visiting assistant professors, and adjuncts teach on fixed contracts, usually without research expectations written into the job.

The standard credential for a tenure-track history appointment is a PhD in history. A master's degree can qualify a candidate to teach at some community colleges and in some adjunct roles, and the federal ONET profile reports that new hires in this occupation need a doctoral degree for some jobs and a master's degree for others. ONET places the occupation in Job Zone Five, its category for work that needs extensive preparation.

Doctoral training. A history PhD generally starts with two years of coursework and reading seminars, followed by qualifying or general exams in a major field and one or two minor fields. The candidate then writes a dissertation prospectus, spends a year or more in archives, and writes a book-length dissertation built on original research. Fields outside U.S. history usually carry language requirements, tested by translation exams; a Latin Americanist reads Spanish or Portuguese, a historian of early modern France reads French and often Latin. The full program commonly runs six to eight years.

Teaching record. Graduate students usually teach as discussion section leaders for faculty-run surveys, and many teach at least one course as instructor of record before going on the market. Search committees ask for a teaching statement, sample syllabi, and evaluations, and teaching-focused colleges weigh that file heavily. A record that shows both a survey course and a seminar in the candidate's field is a strong position to be in.

Research record. At research universities, candidates are judged on whether the dissertation can become a book. A published article in a refereed journal, conference papers at the American Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians annual meetings, and interest from a university press editor all strengthen the file. Postdoctoral fellowships and visiting positions give some candidates a year or two to revise before a tenure-track hire.

After hire. Tenure-track faculty usually face a probationary period of about six years, with a mid-point review. The tenure dossier at a research university is typically built around a published or accepted monograph, supporting articles, teaching evaluations, and external letters from senior scholars in the field. Teaching institutions place more weight on classroom performance and service, though most still expect some scholarly output.

Skills that matter. Paleography for manuscript work, reading knowledge of the languages the sources are in, digital methods such as text mining or GIS mapping for some projects, grant writing, and the ability to explain a complicated argument to nineteen-year-olds in plain English. No license or certification is required; the doctorate and the publication record are the credentials.

The American Historical Association's 2025 Academic Jobs Report, published May 20, 2026, tracks the history hiring market, and its numbers are sobering. The AHA Career Center carried 425 positions listed in the 2024–25 academic year. The number of tenured or tenure-track positions advertised fell 20 percent from the prior year to just 213.

The longer view points the same way. Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, the report says history faculty held at a plateau of around 23,000 from 2010 to 2015, then fell to 19,860 employed by 2024. Its own count of full-time faculty in departments listed continuously in the AHA Directory of History Departments went from 8,692 in 2000 to a high of 9,398 in 2010 before falling to 8,210 in 2025. Regional differences are sharp: departments in the Midwest lost 22 percent of their full-time history faculty from 2010 to 2025, and those in the Northeast lost 14 percent.

The federal projection is flatter. O*NET lists little or no change for History Teachers, Postsecondary over 2025 to 2035, with about 1,500 openings a year on average. The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey counted 18,790 people in the occupation in May 2025.

What this means in practice for someone weighing a PhD:

• Apply broadly. Candidates who can teach a survey outside their specialty, or who fit a joint appointment with an area studies or ethnic studies program, have more doors to try.
• Consider teaching-intensive institutions. Regional public universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges hire for classroom strength, and the job there is a real career, not a consolation prize.
• Build a second track early. The research, writing, and evidence skills a history PhD builds carry into museums, archives, historic preservation, federal historian offices, policy research, publishing, and secondary teaching.
• Read the funding climate. External grants shape who can finish a book on schedule, and humanities funding is in flux; see the FAQ below on the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For people already in tenured posts, tenure itself provides a high degree of job security. The pressure falls on program size: a department facing enrollment or budget cuts can leave a retirement unfilled, merge with other humanities units, or replace a tenure line with contract teaching. Faculty who can show that their courses fill, that their majors find work, and that their research reaches audiences beyond the discipline are better placed to defend their departments in budget season. Pay depends heavily on institution type, rank, and region, so the BLS band above is a national snapshot rather than a promise for any one campus.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am applying for the tenure-track Assistant Professor of History position in nineteenth-century United States history at Lakeshore State University. I completed my PhD at Northbridge University this spring, and I am currently a visiting assistant professor at Greenfield College, where I teach both halves of the U.S. survey and an upper-division course on the Gilded Age.

My research follows freight-rate disputes between Great Lakes shippers and railroad corporations after the Civil War and argues that small-town merchants, not urban reformers, wrote the first drafts of railroad regulation. The book manuscript, built on chamber of commerce minutes, state railroad commission hearings, and merchant correspondence I located in four county historical societies, is under review with a university press. An article drawn from my third chapter appeared in a regional history journal last year.

Lakeshore's emphasis on first-generation students is what draws me most. At Greenfield, I rebuilt the survey around weekly document labs in which students handle digitized letters, ledgers, and newspaper columns and write short arguments from them. Students who arrived certain they disliked history have told me those labs were the first time the subject felt like detective work. I would bring the same approach to your survey sequence and would be glad to develop a seminar on business and labor in the Midwest, which would connect with your public history concentration.

I also bring service experience. As a graduate student I coordinated our department's works-in-progress series and served on a faculty search committee as the student representative, which taught me how much care a good search requires.

Thank you for considering my application. My CV, teaching portfolio, writing sample, and letters accompany this letter, and I would welcome the chance to talk with you.

Sincerely,

Jordan Avery