Friday, March 22, 2013

Humanities PhD Plus

A new article from Inside Higher Ed on formalizing digital humanities training for humanities PhD students. The article reports on the The Praxis Network, whose "programs are allied but differently-inflected humanities education initiatives, mainly focused on graduate training, and all engaged in rethinking pedagogy and campus partnerships in relation to the digital. Among other elements, the initiatives emphasize new models of methodological training and collaborative research. Each program exists within a particular ecosystem of disciplinary expectations, institutional needs, available resources, leadership styles, and specific challenges."

Ph.D. students rethink the tenure track, scope out non-academic jobs

An interesting new article just published on The Berkeley News Center Website. It begins:

The holy grail for Ph.D. students has traditionally been a professorship at a prestigious university, the reward for years of rigorous research, frugal living and a hard-earned collection of published journal papers. But in a sign of changing times, many Ph.D. students today are looking for jobs outside the halls of higher education, as tenure-track faculty positions at campuses nationwide become scarcer in a tight job market.

Enter “Beyond Academia,” the first career conference at the University of California, Berkeley, organized solely by Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows, an unlikely group for a non-academic job fair. The sold-out event — to be held in Berkeley this Friday, March 22 — is a quiet revolution if one considers the investment of time and money that goes into grooming a grad student for a tenure-track position.