All over the United States, historians live and work "outside the box." The backgrounds of these people are varied; they are medievalists, experts in early America, medical historians, specialists in German history, and cultural historians. Outside of academia, they have found satisfying and challenging work--as novelists, public historians, journalists, policy analysts, lawyers, curators, teachers, librarians, career counselors, consultants, web designers, and directors of foundations.
In addition to pursuing a wide range of jobs, these historians also live and work in a variety of places. Our current profiles can be found in states as varied as Colorado, Massachusetts, Washington DC, California, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, North Carolina, Texas and New Jersey. If nothing else, they prove that you can live in the region of your choice while pursuing an intellectual life.
While living and working in these different settings, many of these scholars have continued to write, publishing with The University of California Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Stanford University Press etc. Their articles have appeared in journals as varied as Isis, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Public Historian, and The American Journal of Public Health.
Because so many people have written in to request that we include profiles of historians who found work before completing graduate school or historians who possess an MA, we have added new profiles to this section. We have also added people who obtained additional degrees (MBA and MLS).
These people have generously agreed to assist others by providing information about their careers; they ask that you not contact them for informational interviews at this time.
Dr. Mark Pingree received his doctorate in American history from the University of California, Davis in 2003. He is currently a scholarship coordinator and student advisor at the University of California, Berkeley.
During his fourth year of graduate school, Mark realized that he did not want to become an academic. Watching his own professors struggle to please tenure committees while teaching apathetic students himself made Mark question what he calls the "treadmill feeling"common among junior academics—the need to rack up publications in the hopes of getting tenure or landing a job at a university or college where you actually want to live.
After completing his degree in June, Mark moved to Berkeley in September and began searching for work. It took him about eight months to find his current position. Mark's experiences as a teaching assistant, his work as a volunteer mentor and his doctoral degree were key factors in helping him to obtain his job. These experiences gave him an in-depth understanding of the types of students in his program well as connections to people already in the field. Additionally, his experience in applying to and completing grad school helped him to advise undergraduates in applying to graduate school. As his position is a grant funded one which is rated on how many undergraduates get into and successfully complete graduate school, his background is crucial in helping his program grow. Mark also notes that "as the coordinator of a campus scholarship program for undergraduates engaged in research and community services, the fact that I have a PhD gives the program added credibility among the faculty and campus hierarchy."
Mark's job is varied. He teaches classes and seminars on research and time management skills, develops academic programs, plans and coordinate events, advises students and even does the budgeting for his program.
Although Mark has not published since leaving academia, he intends ultimately to continue his writing and research in the future.
Dr. Gretchen Krueger is a Senior Historian at Wells Fargo Bank.
Gretchen received her doctorate from Yale University. After completing a three-year post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 2006, Gretchen decided to leave academia. Although she had published several articles, participated in numerous conferences and served as an historical consultant for a major medical association, she was concerned that academia was not a good fit for her. Adding to her difficulties was the fact that she and her fiancé, a physicist, faced the “two-body problem.” After three years of living as a bi-coastal couple, they were eager to find jobs in the same area and live together.
Four months after moving to San Francisco, Gretchen accepted a position with Wells Fargo. As the Senior Historian, Gretchen researches and presents family histories to ultra high net worth clients of the bank. This work has led her to research the immigration and migratory patterns of American families.
Gretchen says “80% of my day is devoted to reading and research. The subject is now much broader than my dissertation work, but the investigative methods are identical.” The rest of her time is spent teaching families about their history. She notes with pleasure that her clients “are always captivated by the stories we tell!”
When she accepted her job, she did so with the understanding that the bank would provide her with support for her own scholarship and Gretchen continues to be an active scholar, attending conferences and publishing her work.
After becoming disillusioned with the current state of academia and the low pay given to adjuncts, Gretchen says she is “thrilled to have a job that lets me explore ideas, read widely, and share my knowledge with others.”
Adam received his doctorate in history from Oxford University. As a graduate student, he decided not to pursue an academic career. His reasons were varied but among them was his dislike of the need to balance his research with both teaching and an almost constant job search.
After completing his doctorate, Adam earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. Fascinated by the economic theory of investments, he went into the investment management profession and later worked at two startup internet investment management companies before moving on to found his own company, Peabody River Asset Management, in 2007.
Adam says that his doctorate in history “fostered a form of critical and analytical thinking that has been very valuable” in a business environment. The study of history, he notes, “encourages a tendency to find the larger historical context for business evaluations and decisions and to appreciate that the future will not be a simplistic projection of the present.”
Because so much of business consists of presenting information and arguments to clients and colleagues and persuading them to adopt a particular view, Adam reports that teaching skills are highly valued by employers. Outside of his business offices, Adam also teaches classes for financial professionals, a task he enjoys as it enables him to improve his skills as a presenter. As he develops and expands his own company, Adam continues to draw on and use his skills as a teacher and researcher.
Leaving academia has enabled Adam to maintain multiple pursuits in his personal and professional life. Living in Boston provides him with access to some of the nation’s best archives and research libraries. Proximity to these resources allows Adam to publish book reviews, contribute to different reference works and, more simply, read widely within his field.
Because he has been able to choose where he lives, Adam has also been able to indulge not only his passion for hiking in the White Mountains but also the many pleasures of living in his native New England.
Dr. Darcy Fryer is a teacher at the Brearley School.
Darcy earned her doctorate from Yale University. As a graduate student, she was convinced that she would become a professor and over the course of three years, she applied for nearly a hundred academic positions.
Darcy's experiences on the academic job market were mixed. While she had finished her graduate degree in substantially less time than the average, she found herself confronting search committees who seemed to want "a precocious publishing record more than they wanted a finished degree."
Although she received two offers for tenure-track positions and several for visiting positions, none of these positions matched her needs and predilections. As an observant Jew, she was reluctant to move to a town without a community of like-minded people.
Lacking the savings to support multiple long-distance moves as she searched for the "perfect" academic job, she persuaded the editor of the Franklin Papers to create a short-term position for her in 2001. She held this position for two years, honing her skills as a writer and researcher.
During this time she also taught at Columbia University. This latter work rekindled her love of teaching and she began exploring teaching positions in New York City. In 2003, she accepted a position at the Brearley School, an independent school for girls in Manhattan.
Noting that her students are "almost uniformly curious, engaged and hard-working," Darcy says that teaching at Brearley is "as intellectually challenging and intellectually rewarding as teaching undergraduates at Yale."
Darcy is an active scholar who has published articles and book reviews. Currently, she is working to transform her dissertation into a book.
With a "life that is not very different from that of a professor at a small liberal arts college," Darcy believes that she has found a career that demonstrates the need for a broader understanding of what it means to be an academic historian.
Click on this website to read Darcy's article on teaching at an independent school.
Cara Seitchek is the Assistant Development Officer for Foundations at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Eager to work in a museum, Cara earned a master’s degree in British history from Pennsylvania State University. She later earned two additional master’s degrees, one in Arts Administration from American University and another in writing from Johns Hopkins University.
Although Cara was accepted into the doctoral program in history at Penn State, she decided not to continue on for her PhD. Her reasons for making this decision included her concerns about the academic job market, the impending retirement of her advisor and her realization that her master’s degree would enable her to find work in a museum.
Cara has not completely ruled out the possibility of returning to graduate for a PhD but if she does so, she says her education will be rooted in her “personal interests and desire to research and study” history as opposed to a desire for an academic career.
As a graduate student, Cara held an internship at the Penn State Museum and after graduating, she worked as a registrar for a small museum. From this position, she moved into the world of non-profits, working as a fund-raiser for places like NPR and the Smithsonian before moving on to her current position with the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Graduate school honed Cara’s skills as a researcher and writer. Outside of academe, she found these skills to be invaluable in all of her jobs.
Cara remains an active scholar and writer and she regularly publishes work in a variety of different forums. Among her many publications are scholarly pieces for art history and non-profit journals. She loves being able to write for a diverse audience.
For Cara, leaving academia has allowed her pursue a diverse range of interests.
Dr. Molly Sutphen received her doctorate in history with an emphasis on British and colonial medicine from Yale University in 1995.
A researcher specializing in nursing education, Molly works at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She describes herself as being both in and out of academia---hired to think about teaching and learning while working outside the traditional university or college format.
For the first few years after earning her PhD, Molly followed a traditional path holding two post-doctoral fellowships. During her second post-doc at the University of California, San Francisco, Molly became interested in conducting research on contemporary health care issues. She worked for a small health policy research company and began conducting program evaluations for non-profits groups. Beginning in 2002, she returned to UCSF to work on an interdisciplinary project specializing in medical education, before moving to the Carnegie Foundation in September, 2004.
In describing her work, Molly says "all of the jobs I have held since 2000 have demanded an ability to conduct research, write and write closely with a team." In her work on medical education, she actually did a great deal of archival work. She says that the most obvious difference between her historical work and the work she has done more recently (and now) is working with a team on a shared project. Although she experienced a steep learning curve, she has come to enjoy this aspect of her work.
Molly notes that she uses her training as an historian every day. While she puts on what she calls a health policy researcher mask and uses words like "coding" or "sample size, " she sees herself using similar tools and approaches in her work to those she used as an historian.
Saying that she likes being on "the border of academia, able to crane my neck and see both landscapes," Molly says that she likes working with others on a common goal, which is what teaching is at its best moments. She has also enjoyed escaping from the insularity of the tenure track and she finds it refreshing to leave the academic cocoon. For Molly, the uncertainties of a non-tenured life are balanced by the possibilities of being an historian outside of academia.
Dr. Kevin Graffagnino received his doctorate in American history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1993. He is the Director of the Vermont Historical Society.
Before attending the University of Massachusetts, Kevin earned a master's degree in history at the University of Vermont in 1978. An enthusiastic bibliophile, Kevin worked as the curator of the Vermont history collection at the University of Vermont library before, during and after earning his doctorate.
Kevin went on the academic job market but as he puts it, "my narrow specialization on Vermont and my older age (late 30s) didn't get me far on that front." In 1995, two years after completing his degree, he left the University of Vermont to become the Library Director at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (now the Wisconsin Historical Society). From Wisconsin, he moved to become the Director of the Kentucky Historical Society in 1999. In 2003 he returned home to Vermont to become the Director of the Vermont Historical Society.
Kevin's job requires that he be both an administrator and a scholar. As an administrator, he oversees fundraising efforts, manages the budget and sets and directs the overall mission of the Society. As a scholar, he is called upon to make a contribution to the Vermont historical record and the state's cultural heritage landscape.
While Kevin says that it's hard to find time as the Director to write and publish, he has edited and published extensively. Since completing his master's degree, he has written or edited thirteen books (three since taking on various directorships). He has also published over twenty scholarly articles while writing a variety of short pieces for magazines and newspapers.
Leaving academe has given Kevin a greater opportunity to interact with the general public, which he enjoys. At the same time, the press of administrative priorities occasionally makes him long for the days when as a special collections library curator he spent most of his time immersed in old books, maps and manuscripts.
Dr. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal received her doctorate in American history from Washington State University, Pullman in 2004. A specialist in women's history, she also pursued a field in public history while in graduate school.
Jennifer made the decision to leave academia early on in her graduate career. Her decision was made, in part, as a result of two internships which she held as a graduate student. The first of these was at the Women of the West Museum; the second was with the NASA Johnson Space Center.
Jennifer credits this last internship with providing a stepping stone for her current job as the historian for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Her duties include researching and interviewing people who contributed to the space program and serving as the Oral History Editor for Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. She also supervises the Project's interns, many of whom are, just as she was, graduate students in history.
Speaking about her position, Jennifer says "although I do not consider myself a space historian, my research skills have really helped me in this position. I may not understand a topic at first, but I know where to find the information so that I can learn about it."
Since leaving academia, she has published two articles drawn from her dissertation on Emma DeVoe, the suffragist. She also regularly attends conferences in her position as an oral historian for NASA.
Noting "I like the fact that work and home are separate and that I don't have to constantly check my e-mail to see if a student has contacted me," Jennifer says she greatly enjoys the freedom which comes with leaving academia.
Dr. William Penniston is the Manager of the Library and Archives of the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey). William received his doctorate in French history from the University of Rochester. Before beginning his doctorate at Rochester, he completed a joint MLS/MA program in library science and history at the University of Maryland.
As a graduate student, William presented papers at national and international conferences, published articles and became active on the Committee for Gay and Lesbian History. However, early on his graduate career, he realized that he did not want to become a professor. When an opening came up at the Newark Museum, he decided to apply and was offered the position.
As the manager of both the library and the archives, William is in charge of all aspects of the library from acquisitions to preservation, from reference to administration. He is also responsible for the overall planning and administration of the museum's archive. William works closely with curators, scientists and educators----some of the curators and scientists are serious scholars pursuing their own research but the educators are primarily interested in general information. Dealing with people who are searching for information for different purpose and different audiences is, he says, an interesting and stimulating challenge.
While William's doctorate in European history is not directly relevant to his current job, he feels that the research skills he developed as a graduate student have helped him develop the museum's collections in the fields of American art, Asian art, African art, classical cultures and the natural sciences.
A strong proponent of the library profession, William says being a librarian "has been a good career for me. It has provided me with steady and challenging work, it has brought me into contact with intelligent and creative people, and it has given me a sense of accomplishment and usefulness." It has also allowed William the opportunity to live in a region which he loves and to be with his partner full-time.
Dr. Philip Giltner received his doctorate in modern European history from the University of Toronto in 1997. After graduating, Phil worked briefly as an adjunct before spending four years as a visiting professor at West Point.
While at West Point, Phil applied for several hundred academic positions. When none of these came through, he decided to move in another direction. And in 2002, he accepted a position teaching European and World history at a small private girls' school in Albany, New York. In 2003, Phil moved to the school's partner, a small private boys' high school. At the Albany Academy, Phil teaches European and World history as well as a series of elective courses. In addition to teaching, Phil also oversees extracurricular activities and advises students.
For Phil, teaching high school kids is deeply satisfying because high school teachers are often the first to expose students to major historical figures, trends and ideas. Serving as the gateway to a wider world for your students can be, Phil says, a "big duty but it's also fun." More so than college professors, high school teachers also serve as models for their students and Phil finds being the first adult with whom adolescents connect on an intellectual and personal level to be incredibly stimulating.
Leaving academia has given Phil a wider perspective on the world. Within academia, he notes, "you tend to surround yourself with arcana." While this can be satisfying, being outside of academia can expose you to a wider variety of people and ideas which has its own unique benefits. And he says, he also greatly enjoys the free time which comes with leaving academia—he has more time to read, pursue hobbies and simply spend time with his family.
Pointing out that "geography can be a big part of what makes you happy," Phil also loves being able to live in upstate New York where he grew up. As an "unreconstructed Yankee," he finds great pleasure in living in a small village in a neighborhood which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sheena Morrison is both an independent historian who works as a consultant for the United States Public Health Service and a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University.
Early on in her graduate career, Sheena realized that she did not want to teach. During her third year in graduate school, she found and applied for a summer internship in the Office of the Public Health Service Historian.
The internship opened new doors for her as there had been no real discussion of public history in her graduate program. “I was so pleased to discover that I could be an historian and not teach that I spent the first week of the internship just researching all the different opportunities in public history,” she confesses.
After completing her internship, Sheena returned to Columbia to finish her class work. With her orals completed, she moved to Washington DC and contacted her former supervisor. When she discovered that the office was looking to hire an independent contractor to do historical work, she applied for the position. Sheena’s internship gave her the edge over other applicants and she won the contract.
As an independent consultant, Sheena enjoys what she calls the “good life.” She supports herself while writing her dissertation and because she is located in Washington DC, she has easy access to the National Archives and the National Library of Medicine.
Sheena loves the flexibility which comes with being an independent contractor. She also points out that managing her own finances gives her control over her pay; essentially, she is her own boss. Best of all, working as an independent consultant allows her time to work on her dissertation and to give presentations at different conferences.
For Sheena, one of the best parts of her job is the diversity of the research she is asked to do. It is, she says, “always interesting and challenging” to begin a new research project.
Dr. Heather Lee Miller earned a doctorate in American history from Ohio State University in 2002. She is the humanities acquisitions editor for Ohio State University Press. Although Heather was offered the job before she defended her dissertation, she managed to finish her dissertation while working full-time at the Press. She even managed to find the time to have two children during this period.
As a graduate student, Heather worked as the managing editor at the Journal of Women's History. This experience led the Director of the Press to contact her when he was searching for an acquisitions editor. She interviewed, simply out of curiosity, and was offered the position.
Being an editor, Heather says, is like being a midwife-you help the baby to be born but you don't have to go through the pain of childbirth yourself. Seeing the potential in a manuscript and helping to transform that manuscript into a book is, she notes, "a great feeling." She also enjoys the constructive aspect of editing which differs from the constant critiquing which is common in graduate school. Reflecting on her decision Heather says "I feel lucky! I love my job and I always look forward to going into work."
Leaving academia has also given Heather the freedom to enjoy her scholarly research again. She says that she now views her reading and research with pleasure rather than as a chore. And since receiving her doctorate, she has presented several conference papers, written book reviews and has received commissions for several articles. Ultimately, she intends to publish her dissertation, a study of prostitution and female sexuality and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States.
Being an editor enables Heather to remain in the university environment which she loves without having to deal with the uncertainty of adjuncting, tenure and the academic job market. And having a flexible work schedule, job security, and wonderful benefits while being able to live in a region of her choosing is, she says, liberating.
After receiving his doctorate, Eric held a Harper Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago where he won a prestigious teaching award. During his three year fellowship, Eric applied for more than a hundred tenure-track positions. None came through and with a new daughter, he decided to try something new.
His first job out of academia was with an innovative hedge fund which was looking for non-traditional employees. While he was at the hedge fund for only a few months, he gained a background in finance and computers and was able to move on, briefly, to an internet start-up company. He notes, with some amusement, that networking can work in odd and unpredictable ways---"my 24 year old boss happened to be the big brother of one of my former students." From the internet company, he moved on to Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company where he has worked since 1999.
Eric's strong background in the history of medicine enabled him to gain his current position. He loves his work, finds it stimulating to interact on a daily basis with extraordinarily bright people and enjoys the benefits which come from the higher salaries which are more commonly found outside of rather than inside academia.
Leaving academia has also given Eric more freedom. Looking back at his academic life, Eric says "I use to work all the time. And I mean all the time. I always felt like there was something more I could do land a job -- teach better, publish more, attend more conferences, cultivate more allies. etc." Now, he relishes his free weekends and the time he spends with his two young daughters.
Dr. Alex Pang received his doctorate in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. The son of a professor, Alex was convinced that he would become an academic: "I was as clueless---and contemptuous---of the business world as you can get."
Five years on the job market---three as a post-doc and two as a lecturer at the University of California, Davis---led Alex to reassess his thinking. And in 1996, when an opportunity presented itself, he left academia to become the deputy editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. At Britannica, Alex managed the editorial division at a time when the company was moving from print to electronic publishing. The work, done at a time when the Internet was exploding, was incredibly stimulating. It was, Alex says, "a whole career compressed into three years." This experience also led Alex to write his essay "The Journeyman Project," which discussed the experience of leaving academia.
In 1999, Alex returned to his native California to take a job at Stanford, teaching and working on electronic archiving projects. In 2000, he became an affiliate of the Institute for the Future, a small think tank of about 25 people. When the Stanford project ended, Alex turned to freelance work, then in mid-2001 was hired on by the Institute full-time. His main duties include researching and writing about emerging technologies. "It's really history of science, only about the future," he says.
Alex has continued to do research and to publish; his book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, (Stanford University Press) appeared in 2002 and he has written for a range of journals, including Isis and The Atlantic Monthly.
Reflecting on his decision, Alex notes that "the life of the mind is highly portable: research and writing can be done outside the friendly confines of colleges and university, and some of us can even become better scholars for having experienced the worlds of commerce and public culture."
Dr. Todd Moye earned his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1999. A specialist in the modern American civil rights movement, Todd says, "I never consciously decided to leave academia." Rather, he moved gradually into the field, discovering in the process how much he loved public history.
After earning his doctorate, Todd received a post-doctoral fellowship at the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. In addition to his other duties at the Center, Todd drew on the Avery's material on both Reconstruction-era and contemporary black legislators to develop the South Carolina Black Legislators Oral History Project. Because the state legislature was engulfed in a controversy over the confederate flag at the time, Todd and a graduate student he was training recorded some very timely material about identity politics and the role of black legislators across South Carolina’s recent history.
Todd's experiences at the Avery gave him the necessary skills and background for his current position, directing a nationwide oral history project for the National Park Service. As the Director of the Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project, which is based in Atlanta, Todd supervises a staff of three; records and edits interviews of the airmen; works on publicity for the project; and collaborates with the multi-disciplinary team developing the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in Alabama. Reflecting on his job, Todd says, "I love the mission of the National Park Service and appreciate the feeling that I'm doing my part for the cause." He also notes, "I have as great, if not a greater, opportunity to help people learn about an important chapter in American history as I ever did lecturing undergraduates."
Todd also continues to work as a scholar. He attends conferences, writes articles and reviews books for major journals. His own book, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in the fall of 2004.
As the father of a fourteen month old boy, Todd says that he and his wife don't have much of a social life at the moment! But in the meantime, he loves the fact that "when I go home from work, I'm home from work enjoying my family. No blue books and no waking up in the middle of the night thinking about how I'm going to explain the Populists to tomorrow morning's section of my survey class."
Dr. Steve Ruskin is an historian of science who received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 2002. Steve is the Senior Product and Market Analyst for an email security company called MX Logic. In this position, he is responsible for competitive analysis, writing white papers, conducting webinars (web seminars) and a variety of other projects.
Noting the "fierce competition for so few jobs—jobs that offered much work, little pay and no real sense of control over lifestyle choices such as location and career advancement"--- Steve began to think about leaving academia as a graduate student. Eager to return to his home state of Colorado where he could ski and bike, he came to realize that the prospects for a PhD outside of academia, "especially for one who had done work in the field of Science and Technology Studies were pretty good." His training in "Science and Technology Studies" (the umbrella term for all fields encompassing history, philosophy, sociology and economics of science and technology) impressed the CEO of his company and Steve was offered his current position during an informational interview.
Steve continues to be an active scholar. His dissertation was published as John Herschel's Cape Voyage: Private Science, Public Imagination and the Ambitions of Empire (Ashgate Press) in March of 2004 and he reviews science and technology books for the largest daily newspaper in the Rocky Mountain West. As a subject expert in the email security field, Steve also frequently writes articles for magazines and newspapers.
Leaving academia has given Steve a range of options; he lives in a region he loves and he has the time to ski, bike, read and write while enjoying a solid intellectual life, without the uncertainty of a non-tenured academic position.
Dr. Anne Whisnant is the Mellon Project Manager for the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
Anne received her doctorate in American history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1997. During her first few years out of graduate school, she worked as an adjunct; during that period, she and her husband also had two children. In 1999, two years after she had begun adjuncting, Anne decided to stay at home as this enabled her both to be with her children full-time and to work on her book (Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blueridge Parkway History was recently published with the University of North Carolina Press). The crash of the stock market and her husband's retirement led her to reassess her decision.
In 2002, she began searching for a job—having strong personal ties to the Research Triangle Area, she was eager to remain in the Raleigh-Durham area and she focused her search on opportunities in the region. For Anne, the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians provided "the real turning point" in her job search. After attending workshops and sessions on "alternative" careers for historians, she recognized that, as she puts it, "I had not emerged from eight years of graduate training with no marketable skills!"
Following the OAH meeting, Anne networked actively, did informational interviews and talked about her job search with everyone she knew. She learned about her current job at the Humanities Institute from a member of her book group. As the Mellon Project Manager, Anne runs a variety of programs funded by the Mellon Foundation. She coordinates lecture series, plans workshops (including workshops on career opportunities for humanities PhDs), oversees the Institute's partnership with the Duke University Press, supervises the operation of some undergraduate-oriented programs, and generally seeks to raise the profile of the humanities at Duke. Anne's background and doctorate in the humanities were essential for the job—her PhD in the humanities enables her to speak credibly on the value of the humanities.
Anne loves the variety offered by her current job, and enjoys being in academia while not enduring the pressures of the tenure track. Working with scholars and ideas in the familiar world of higher education while learning broadly applicable new skills has made academic administration a splendid new direction in which to go for her. She also notes that "getting paid regularly, and decently" after her years as both a graduate student and an adjunct is wonderful! And perhaps most importantly, Anne enjoys being able to leave her work behind at 5:00 PM to be with her husband and two young sons.
Dr. Lisa Walker earned her doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley in December, 2003.
The emergence of glasnost had led Lisa to major in Russian literature as an undergraduate and she pursued this interest after graduation, working on issues regarding academic exchange and collaboration between the US and the former Soviet Union. Ultimately, Lisa's interests led her to pursue a graduate degree in Russian history and she entered the field just as the changes in the former Soviet Union were beginning to re-shape the study and understanding of Russian history. Lisa's dissertation focused on public health issues which had resulted from the urbanization of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia.
Just a few months before completing her degree, Lisa accepted a position in the Biotechnology Engagement Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services. In her current job, she helps to develop collaborative biomedical research projects in the former Soviet Union, encouraging former bioweapons experts to redirect their skills and expertise toward civilian research and to integrate themselves in the international scientific community. While her job draws on her background and degree in Russian medical history, Lisa says that the content of her PhD was less important than the training her graduate degree gave her in "gathering, organizing and processing" information.
Lisa's decision to work for the federal government was the result of a multi-faceted job search. As she completed her degree, she developed her academic dossier but she also began actively exploring the field of international public health. Realizing that historians could and did follow career paths outside of academia, especially in the government sector, she did a series of informational interviews in Washington DC. She was offered her current position as a result of this informational interviewing.
While she has continued to be active in the historical community, her new job presents her with an opportunity to "learn new things which I didn't have time to pursue as a graduate student" and which she would have had little reason to pursue had she had remained in academia.
Working in DC also enables Lisa to live with her husband and she greatly enjoys the weekends and non-work times when, as she says, her time "is truly my own."
Dr. Wendy Waters received her doctorate in Latin American and Comparative World History from the University of Arizona. Wendy became an historian because she was fascinated by the interaction of global politics, economics and cultures. While she loved graduate school, she gradually came to realize that "what typically came next—being a professor—sounded increasingly unappealing." The rigid structure of the academic life which can entail teaching the same courses over and over again as well as the idea of living in a region which was not to her liking helped her decide to leave academia.
Shortly after completing her dissertation, she became a supervisor at an internet start-up company. For Wendy, this was a dream job; as an academic specialist in revolutions, she loved being on the inside of the Internet Revolution. The subsequent crash of the internet economy led to her being laid off in July 2001.
While being unemployed in a recessed economy was difficult, Wendy found an unpaid internship as a financial writer which helped her to gain new skills. This internship ultimately helped her prove her economic analysis abilities in an interview for her current job, research director at a commercial real estate company. There, she oversees a variety of different projects, ranging from researching and writing demographic analyses of specific communities to real estate market analysis to a study on how corporations manage their real estate facilities following mergers and acquisitions. Graduate school gave her valuable experience researching and writing analytical reports, university teaching added the equally valuable skill of being able to become an expert on a subject quickly, and to write about it. This academic background allowed her to excel and to gain national recognition for her contributions to real estate industry research. Wendy notes that "although the ability to write a good research paper is common place in history departments, this is not always the case in the corporate world!"
Wendy's job gives her a great deal of autonomy. She also finds herself using the theory from her dissertation (which was about post-modernity and reconstructed space) in her thinking about the ways in which businesses and institutions use their offices and facilities. She enjoys helping clients research potential new locations world wide, and her comparative-world history background comes in handy for this work.
Leaving academia has enabled Wendy to have more free time and to feel free-she can live anywhere she likes, read and learn what she wants and travel anywhere in the world, just for fun, not for research.
Dr. Alexander Rossino is Vice-President of the World Future Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about the need for a greater commitment to investment in the future. At the World Future Fund, Dr. Rossino heads the Global Totalitarianism Research Project, which studies authoritarianism throughout history.
Before working at the WFF, Dr. Rossino worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, first in the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute, and then at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, when the name was changed in 1997. He began his professional career in the Photo Archive as an historian and archivist, a dual-position which he says gave him a unique perspective on the archival side of historical studies. While at the Center, Dr. Rossino also held a post-doctoral fellowship and worked as a lead researcher for a multi-volume encyclopedia the Center is doing on the Nazi concentration camp system.
Despite leaving academia, Dr. Rossino has remained an active scholar. Since 1997 he has published four major articles and a handful of book reviews. And in May 2003, his monograph Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocityappeared with the University Press of Kansas.
Dr. Rossino decided to leave academia while completing his doctorate at Syracuse University. His reasons for leaving academia were varied. On one level, he felt frustrated by the disconnect which sometimes occurs in the classroom, where students often are not as enthusiastic or committed to the subject as the professor. In addition, however, Rossino was also concerned about the high pressure stakes of the academic life, which he felt encouraged scholars to forego a personal life for the sake of a career that provided questionable economic security in the early years and which can force one to reside in a less than ideal geographic location.
Since leaving academia Rossino has been pleased with the diversity of "having one foot in the world of scholarship and another in the ordinary work world." To him "the varied pace of scholarly vs. daily office work" is satisfying and "has an immediate relevance that teaching simply did not offer me."
Dr. Alison Li is a partner in HJC New Media, a consulting firm that helps nonprofit organizations use new media more effectively. Clients include Amnesty International, Greenpeace International, and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. As an historian of medicine, Alison has a special interest in the development of medical research and has focused on working with health charities.
Alison received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1993, and after a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was hired to a tenure-track position in Science Studies at York University in 1994. In 1998, having become disenchanted by the academic politics in her unit, she took a one-year leave of absence. She joined two friends who had established a consulting business with a special expertise in helping charities use the Internet. Alison valued the opportunity to work with fine organizations and to engage in creative and practical projects with concrete results. Moreover, having experienced being part of a large institution, she found it gratifying to become an entrepreneur and to take on the challenge of shaping a new business. She decided to leave York University permanently and became a co-owner of HJC New Media.
The decision to leave academia was not an easy one for Alison to make, and it has had its price. Building a small business has certainly had its share of struggles. However, she has found that the loss of the stability, secure income, and prestige associated with an academic appointment has been more than compensated for by the gain in being able to steer her own course and the satisfaction of making a tangible and meaningful contribution. As a consultant, Alison has continued to carry out research, win research grants, and publish in both the history of medicine and nonprofit studies (she is a co-editor of Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945 and the author of J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise).
Four Transformed Academics, or Here's Where We Prove That Nothing is Too Obscure
Gregor Samsa is a specialist in the history of science (his dissertation: A Great Metamorphosis: Physics in Eighteenth-Century France). Greg spent a year in France researching his dissertation-since then, he has worked as a tenure-track assistant professor (two years). Greg majored in physics as an undergraduate and, while writing his dissertation, he expanded his understanding of this field. He is able to read and understand fairly complex scientific documents. Greg has published two articles in Isis and is negotiating with a university press for his book. While serving as a faculty member, he helped redesign his department's major; he also worked across the university to help create ties between the sciences and the humanities.
Things Greg should emphasize on his resume/in interviews and in job letters:
In-depth knowledge of and understanding of French culture
Ability to work with and create ties between scientists and non-scientists
Published with University of Chicago Press
In-depth understanding of scientific culture and foundations
Comfortable with giving public presentations in French
Some suggestions as to where he can look for satisfying work
Scientific foundations (National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation, American Association for the Advancement of Science etc.)
Scientific journals with general audiences (Scientific American, National Geographic etc.)
Organizations and businesses which seek to promote French culture
French businesses
International societies which emphasize the sciences
Educational foundations which seek to integrate the sciences and humanities for students (these are very trendy)
Museums of Science (these exist in many cities-from Baltimore to Boston)
Leopold Bloom is a specialist in early modern German religious history (his dissertation: Reluctant Revolutionaries: Reform Ministers and the Peasants War in Germany). Leo speaks fluent German and is comfortable working with documents in sixteenth-century German dialects. He chose his topic of study because he is interested in the conflict between secular and religious authorities. While working on his dissertation, Leo studied abroad and lived in Berlin. Leo completed his doctorate in seven years and he has worked as a visiting professor at a small southern college for two years.
Things Leo should emphasize on his resume/in interviews and in job letters:
Fluent German
French (he passed a graduate language exam)
The rapid completion of his doctorate (he finished in less than the average time)
The ability to create and change websites (Leo always created his own websites when teaching)
The ability to meet deadlines
Flexibility and ability to master new subjects quickly (because the college at which he taught was so small, Leo also taught a German-language class and classes on Asian history)
Public speaking skills (Leo has given papers at European and American conferences)
Ability to give public presentations in German
Some suggestions as to where he can look for satisfying work:
Art auction houses such as Southeby's and Christie's
Organizations which focus on the separation of church and state in American society (ACLU, People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State The Center for Inquiry, etc.)
Organizations which seek to promote German culture
Law firms focusing on either German businesses or reparations claims
The US Government (specifically the Library of Congress which always needs fluent speakers and the Department of State but also the CIA and the Congressional Research Service)
Businesses which have German-American ties
Web design companies, especially those with a focus on German-American or educational issues
Alice Liddle is a specialist in American labor history (her dissertation: A Sense of Wonder: Strikes During the McCarthy Years). As a graduate student, Alice became involved in the movement to unionize teaching assistants (she has been to national meetings to discuss this and organize her fellow teaching assistants). In writing her dissertation, Alice used oral history (she should look over her contacts and re-assess whether these can be useful to her now; a former union head may, for example, know the current union leader).
Things Alice should emphasize on her resume/in interviews and in job letters:
In-depth knowledge and understanding of labor issues in the US
Organizing skills
Her oral history skills (especially if she is interested in doing reporting or writing)
Ability to give oral presentations (Alice has given two papers at graduate student conferences)
75% success in writing grants over a nine year period (Alice received 3 out of the 4 grants she applied for during her nine year graduate career)
Some suggestions as to where she can look for satisfying work:
Federal or various state departments of labor
Union organizations
Lobbying groups which focus on workers' rights
Museums and historical sites, especially those which focus on social history and workers' rights (The Tenement Museum, Smithsonian etc.)
Human resources departments of businesses, especially those known for worker-friendly policies (Ben and Jerry's, Whole Foods etc.)
Groups which seek to promote first-amendment rights (ACLU, Media Watch etc.)
Newspapers and newsletters which strongly identify with workers' rights (The Nation, The Socialist Worker etc.)
Staff of a state or federal legislator who specializes in labor issues or serves on labor-related committees
Elizabeth Bennett is a specialist in nineteenth-century Arab women (her dissertation: Lifting the Veil: The World of Middle-Class Egyptian Women, 1823-1918). She has spent a fair amount of time in Egypt doing research (6 months) and has good Arabic. She became interested in her subject while working for the Peace Corps in Jordan.
Things Liz should emphasize on her resume/in interviews and in job letters:
Arabic
Extensive experience working and living in the Mid-East
Knowledge and understanding of women's issues
In-depth understanding of Islamic beliefs and practices, especially as they relate to Egypt and Jordan
Some suggestions as to where she can look for satisfying work:
Feminist organizations which fight for women's issues in the third world (Equality Now etc.)
The United Nations
The US Government (Department of State, the CIA, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the FBI, the Congressional Research Service)
Medical organizations which provide support to the third world (Doctors without Borders, Worldwide Fund for Mothers Injured in Childbirth etc.)
Business companies with ties to the Middle East
Educational organizations which focus on third-world women
Lobbying organizations for Arab interests and Arab-Americans
Organizations which seek to promote democracy worldwide (Amnesty International, The Carr Foundation, Freedom House etc.)
There are many ways of being an historian and many more people than you realize are historians. We've compiled a list of some of the more Famous Historians Who Live Undetected Among Us.
The people below are intended, as are our monthly profiles, to provide you with inspiration and an understanding of the options which you have. We aren't suggesting that you rush out and write a best-selling novel or create a Grammy-winning musical group——but rather that you begin to look more closely at the people around you. You may be surprised to discover that the lawyer whom you met at the last PTA meeting has an MA in history, that the author whose work you admire has a doctorate in history or that your neighbor who is a civil servant has a doctorate in history.
We hope that you will use this list as a starting point for your own list of Historians Who Work Outside of Academia.
Gregorian is the president of the Carnegie Corporation. Before heading the Carnegie Corporation, he served first as the president of the New York Library and then as president of Brown University. In 1998, President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal.
Scott Kleeb, (PhD, Yale, 2006):
In 2006, as Scott Kleeb completed his dissertation in history at Yale, he began running for Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District. On his campaign website and in his ads, Kleeb pointed out that his in-depth knowledge of Nebraska’s history (developed while writing a dissertation on the history of cattle ranching) gave him a unique and nuanced understanding of Nebraska and its needs. Although Kleeb lost in a hotly contested election, we suspect that Kleeb’s career has just begun.
Gordon Brown, (PhD, Edinburgh University):
In 2007, Gordon Brown became the Prime Minister of Britain. Brown's dissertation on the history of the early Labour Party in Scotland has undoubtedly provided him with a strong understanding of political issues in Britain.
Lucy Killea, (PhD, University of California, San Diego 1975):
In California, Killea is well-known for her eighteen years of service as an elected official, serving on the San Diego City Council (1978-82); in the California State Assembly (1982-89); and in the State Senate (1989-96).
Barbara Mertz a.k.a Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels (PhD, University of Chicago, 1952):
An Egyptologist, Mertz is an award-winning murder mystery writer whose works have dominated the New York Times best-seller list for decades. In 1998, she was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America.
Sharan Newman (currently a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara):
A student of medieval history, Newman is the author of a series of murder mysteries set in medieval France. Her books have won numerous awards, among them the Macavity Best First Novel award for Death comes as Epiphany in 1994 and the first Herodotus Award for Cursed in Blood in 1999.
Sarah Paretsky (PhD, University of Chicago, 1975):
After receiving her doctorate in history, Paretsky recognized the "complete lack of academic jobs for historians [and she]...bowed to the inevitable...and got an MBA from the University of Chicago." She worked as a marketing manager for an insurance company for ten years before turning to writing. Today, she is an award-winning novelist whose popular murder mysteries featuring V.I. Warshawski have been made into a film starring Kathleen Turner.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, (PhD, Howard University, 1975):
An African-American historian, Johnson is the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a Grammy-winning African-American a capella group. Her historical scholarship has been informed by her work as a political activist. In 1989, she received a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
Even fictional characters sometimes decide to leave academia. Some characters, such as Michael Malone's Cuddy Mangum, pursue and earn a PhD in history but decide never to become academics, while others, such as Elizabeth Peter's Vicky Bliss, walk away from positions as history professors to pursue other careers. Many of these authors have made decisions similar to those of their characters. Malone walked away from a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. Peters (real name: Barbara Mertz) has a PhD from the University of Chicago but chose not to be a professor.
Most graduate schools provide little or no career counseling for their students. If you have spent six or more years in the Ivory Tower, you are unlikely to know anything about the non-academic world or non-academic jobs---even if you spent time in the non-academic world before entering graduate school.
Recognize that your understanding of the non-academic world is non-existent or, at best, six or more years out of date. If you have an assumption about a job but have never done an informational interview with someone who works in that field, admit that that assumption is based on a lack of knowledge and is therefore probably incorrect.
There are many myths about the non-academic world and the academic world. We are going to list some of them because we want you to understand that they are myths. One: people in corporate America are faceless drones who labor in cubicles and are all unhappy. Two: unless your job title is "Historian," you do not use the skills or training you learned in graduate school. Three: academic jobs are all wonderful and allow you to engage in scholarly research 24-7. Four: public historians do History Lite and the field is occupied by people who are not real scholars. Five: jobs at think tanks and foundations are so rare that an historian will never obtain one and should not bother to try. Six: independent scholars, even those who possess PhDs, are not really serious historians and their work is not deserving of respect. Seven: people who did not go to graduate school have never heard of, much less read, the works of Foucault, the Annales School or any other great thinker or great intellectual movement of the twentieth century. Eight: everyone in the "real" world follows a straight career path. Nine: people in the "real" world do not understand or value the training a PhD has. Ten: managers and high-level people simply grind the faces of the poor and oppressed every day and those who work for them become Part of the Problem.
Does Number Ten seem silly? Of course, it does. But Numbers One through Nine are equally silly (although sadly, these statements are commonly accepted as the truth by many PhDs and graduate students). Any PhD who believes these things has failed to do research on this subject; whether you remain in academia or not, you need to understand that these statements are myths which are detrimental not only to your job search but to the historical profession in general.
backgrounds of these people are varied; they are medievalists, experts in early America, medical historians, specialists in German history, and cultural historians. Outside of academia, they have found satisfying and challenging work--as novelists, public historians, journalists, policy analysts, lawyers, curators, teachers, librarians, career counselors, consultants, web designers, and directors of foundations. 
While living and working in these different settings, many of these scholars have continued to write, publishing with The University of California Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Stanford University Press etc. Their articles have appeared in journals as varied as Isis, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Public Historian, and The American Journal of Public Health.
In describing her work, Molly says "all of the jobs I have held since 2000 have demanded an ability to conduct research, write and write closely with a team." In her work on medical education, she actually did a great deal of archival work. She says that the most obvious difference between her historical work and the work she has done more recently (and now) is working with a team on a shared project. Although she experienced a steep learning curve, she has come to enjoy this aspect of her work. 
Before attending the University of Massachusetts, Kevin earned a master's degree in history at the University of Vermont in 1978. An enthusiastic bibliophile, Kevin worked as the curator of the Vermont history collection at the University of Vermont library before, during and after earning his doctorate. 
Jennifer made the decision to leave academia early on in her graduate career. Her decision was made, in part, as a result of two internships which she held as a graduate student. The first of these was at the Women of the West Museum; the second was with the NASA Johnson Space Center. 
for the United States Public Health Service and a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University.
acclaimed book, 
son of a professor, Alex was convinced that he would become an academic: "I was as clueless---and contemptuous---of the business world as you can get." 
first few years out of graduate school, she worked as an adjunct; during that period, she and her husband also had two children. In 1999, two years after she had begun adjuncting, Anne decided to stay at home as this enabled her both to be with her children full-time and to work on her book (
research, win research grants, and publish in both the history of medicine and nonprofit studies (she is a co-editor of 
Gregor Samsa is a specialist in the history of science (his dissertation: A Great Metamorphosis: Physics in Eighteenth-Century France). Greg spent a year in France researching his dissertation-since then, he has worked as a tenure-track assistant professor (two years). Greg majored in physics as an undergraduate and, while writing his dissertation, he expanded his understanding of this field. He is able to read and understand fairly complex scientific documents. Greg has published two articles in Isis and is negotiating with a university press for his book. While serving as a faculty member, he helped redesign his department's major; he also worked across the university to help create ties between the sciences and the humanities.
in sixteenth-century German dialects. He chose his topic of study because he is interested in the conflict between secular and religious authorities. While working on his dissertation, Leo studied abroad and lived in Berlin. Leo completed his doctorate in seven years and he has worked as a visiting professor at a small southern college for two years.
Alice Liddle is a specialist in American labor history (her dissertation: A Sense of Wonder: Strikes During the McCarthy Years). As a graduate student, Alice became involved in the movement to unionize teaching assistants (she has been to national meetings to discuss this and organize her fellow teaching assistants). In writing her dissertation, Alice used oral history (she should look over her contacts and re-assess whether these can be useful to her now; a former union head may, for example, know the current union leader).
There are many ways of being an historian and many more people than you realize are historians. We've compiled a list of some of the more Famous Historians Who Live Undetected Among Us. 
Even fictional characters sometimes decide to leave academia. Some characters, such as Michael Malone's Cuddy Mangum, pursue and earn a PhD in history but decide never to become academics, while others, such as Elizabeth Peter's Vicky Bliss, walk away from positions as history professors to pursue other careers. Many of these authors have made decisions similar to those of their characters. Malone walked away from a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. Peters (real name: Barbara Mertz) has a PhD from the University of Chicago but chose not to be a professor. 
Most graduate schools provide little or no career counseling for their students. If you have spent six or more years in the Ivory Tower, you are unlikely to know anything about the non-academic world or non-academic jobs---even if you spent time in the non-academic world before entering graduate school.