Tag: job market


We Really Can’t Afford to Go Back to Normal

A few weeks ago, after emailing a representative of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), it became apparent to me that the Fall conference-going season in our field will be moving forward as the usual in-person meetings instead of the hybrid format that, in the light of a year living with COVID-19, I had assumed would be offered. It’s now becoming apparent to others as well, with an online petition now circulating, addressed to the leadership of the Society of […]

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It’s About More Than the Review

So, I wrote a thing recently about how writing book reviews is not worthless. But I got some push back concerning how some people in the profession, such as contingent faculty, don’t have the time or the ability to work for free by writing book reviews. I did say writing review was good for people at all career stages, after all, no? I find this response lamentable, to be honest, because I don’t happen to think that writing book reviews […]

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Points for Honesty and Candor…?

This morning I caught a tweet that struck me as just as curious as the responses from some on Twitter. First off, the tweet: A professor who received his PhD from Harvard was asked to give some advice to potential grad school applicants today: [paraphrased] “Um, the job market was good back then and it was super easy. I have no real insight into the current process. I’m sorry.” — Shane Wagoner (@shanewag1) February 2, 2019 It’s curious to me […]

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It’s Time We Tackle This Directly

On Facebook the other day I read a post by a doctoral student in the US who, near done the degree, is venturing into a possible career outside the university; the post repeated a theme we’ve long heard in the humanities: we generally conceive of learning and research too narrowly and, by extension, graduate training ought to be re-calibrated to take into account the many other futures for which we might be preparing students. I admit that I found this […]

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“Is that enough of a reference for you?”

Justin Dearborn is a 2007 UA graduate of New College, with a Depth Study in “Religion, Social Structure, and Culture Studies,” who was a frequent member of REL seminars. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is the US National Sales Manager for an Icelandic Craft Brewery. As I sit here on a Saturday afternoon, warm coffee in hand and enjoying the weekend, I find myself feeling both nostalgic and lucky. Nostalgic considering Dr. McCutcheon’s request for REL Grads to […]

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Aim High…?

I was at one of the field’s doctoral schools a while back, to give a talk, and heard from a couple sources — both grad students repeating what they’d been told as well as from a faculty member — that the primary purpose for students to be enrolled in graduate school (or perhaps at that particular one) was “to write a field-changing dissertation.” Sure, being professionalized as a grad student, such as accumulated publications of your own and gaining teaching […]

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Call for Participants “…But What Do You Study?”: A NAASR Workshop on Succeeding in the Job Market

Michael Graziano is an instructor of Religious Studies at the University of Northern Iowa. If the phrase “academic job market” makes you feel like the picture above you’re not alone. There’s no shortage of posts, essays, tweets, and columns dispensing advice on the job market: what to study, how to shape a CV, and what to say in a cover letter. The rules—both written and unwritten—can seem inscrutable. That’s in part why, for the second year in a row, NAASR will […]

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Historic Artifact? An Open Letter to Department Search Committees from 1997

The following (co-written with my then co-editor at the now defunct Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, the late Tim Murphy), first appeared as an open letter in our inaugural issue (26/1 [1997]) and was then reproduced as the appendix to chapter 6 of The Discipline of Religion (2003).  Though many things about the academic labor market may have changed over the past 20 years (e.g., many universities have moved to online application systems, complete […]

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