A career in 'ancient history'
Noch
I wanted to send a general post firstly to introduce myself properly, and
secondly to ask you all a question.
I'm a student currently considering my career options, and I'm quite
interested in the possibility of going into a life of research and lecturing
on ancient civilisations (I'm yet to decide which civilisations most
interest me - I have three or so I'm most interested in). Is anyone here
actually a historian / university lecturer, and would like to tell be
briefly what it's like? I've been told by quite a few people that, as a
woman, I'd find it quite difficult to 'get anywhere' in academia..
Thanks in advance for any help.
War Criminal
"Noch" <euri...@hotmail.com> wrote:
I have an M.A. in Classics (early Imperial Rome), and gave up (didn't go
on to get my Ph.D.) because there are very few jobs in the field. Most
of the people I knew who had doctorates were living as visiting
professors, going to a different university each year. I hate for this
to be a let-down, but better you find out sooner than I did.
As for being a woman, that may work to your advantage so far as
affirmative action is concerned - I don't know if they have that in
Australia or not.
Noch
> I have an M.A. in Classics (early Imperial Rome), and gave up (didn't go
> on to get my Ph.D.) because there are very few jobs in the field. Most
> of the people I knew who had doctorates were living as visiting
> professors, going to a different university each year. I hate for this
> to be a let-down, but better you find out sooner than I did.
>
> As for being a woman, that may work to your advantage so far as
> affirmative action is concerned - I don't know if they have that in
> Australia or not.
Being a visiting professor wouldn't be so horrible if the pay was decent
enough... is it decent enough?
What did you end up deciding to do, if you don't mind me asking?
War Criminal
"Noch" <euri...@hotmail.com> wrote:
I worked my way through grad school in a student job as a computer
troubleshooter for the university, and when I finished my M.A. I went
into the private sector doing just that. In general, the pay is better
than being a Classics prof - the amount of pay varies from school to
school, and within each school from department to department, Classics
usually being on the low end of the pay scale.
From all of the visiting profs I have sought career advice from, it is
not pleasant to have to move all your stuff every year to a new place
where you are essentially treated as a substitute teacher for the
regular professor who is on sabbatical. There's a lot of competition
for tenure-track positions.
I would talk to your own professors and graduate students in Classics
departments and ask them about this. Grad students are especially the
best for this kind of info, since they're looking out for future jobs
themselves. I graduated about ten years ago and live in the United
States, so conditions may be somewhat different now.
When I am asked why I didn't go on to get my doctorate, I simply say:
"There's no future in ancient history."
Edwin Menes
at the university level for a long time. My observations apply only to
the United States. There are several ways to slice the question.
First, it matters where you get your degree. To get a job here, you
really need to have it from a USan or Canadian university, approximately
50 of which grant the PhD. Oxford and Cambridge graduates do not have
the cachet they used to, primarily because we generally place equal
emphasis on teaching and research and do not hire anyone without
experience, at least as a teaching assistant. Canadian institutions of
any sort are required by law to give preference to qualified Canadian
citizens.
[sub-first: There is also a perception of a hierarchy among USan
institutions, but it is not so strong as it used to be, it is subject to
regional prejudices (Berkeley v. Michigan v. Harvard, e.g.), and it is
somewhat undermined by a counter perception that many graduates of elite
institutions do not know Latin and Greek very well. Perhaps that is the
reason for the rise of 'theory', many of whose proponents to do not know
English very well either. My prejudices are showing, perhaps because I
am a graduate of one those institutions and keep asking myself what has
gone wrong.]
Second, Ancient History by itself will not get one very far. Not to
harp on it, but how good are your Latin and Greek? Would you be able to
teach courses in the texts of the ancient historians? Or from the other
side, is antiquity the only period you know anything about? Here, in
round numbers about half of Ancient History degrees are granted by
Classics Depts., the other half by History Depts. (The reasons for the
split are more historical than theoretical.) If you can teach
elementary and intermediate language and the texts of the Greek and
Roman historians as well as Ancient History, you can find a home in
either a Classics Dept. or a History Dept., and the prospects of a job
are considerably brighter. In a History Dept., though, you had better
be willing to teach at least World History, if not another place or
period..
Third, how interested are you in research and publication? Teaching
alone won't carry anyone any more (as it did when I started in the
profession). Even small Liberal Arts schools with sterling reputations
for teaching want to see an article now and then. My best friend is at
one such now and he is an outstanding teacher, but the fact that he has
published an article as a grad student helped him get the job. (This is
three years ago; he came late to Classics.)
Fourth, in Classics, any new graduate (PhD needed, ABD may be
considered, MA need not apply) should expect to hold two or three or
four visiting positions before landing a tenure-track job. What gets
you the first job is: writing sample (article or dissertation chapter),
evidence of effective teaching, and especially letters of recommendation
and a good interview. Successive jobs add teaching experience and
better recommendations (one hopes). The pay for these is about what the
lowest-paid assistant professor at the institution would receive, a
range at the moment (depending on region, location, and type of
institution) from about US$25,000-$40,000.
Fifth, being a woman may be an advantage in academic job-hunting but I
would be hard-pressed to prove it. My department was never pressured.
At the end of the hiring process, I had to submit a report indicating
how many women and minorities had applied for the job, how many had been
invited for an interview (we were limited to a total of three), and our
reason for hiring the person we did instead of other candidates. But we
were never questioned.
Sixth, from the early 70s to the early 90s, the job market was pretty
dismal but it's really not too bad now. You should be able to find full
reports both on gender and on hiring at http://www.apaclassics.org.
Finally, I think very few people pursue Classics from a love of
reputation or money. You do it for love and hope for the best.
Polybius
A high school education isn't required to write history...anyone can
write history...:o))))))))))))
Noch
> troubleshooter for the university, and when I finished my M.A. I went
> into the private sector doing just that. In general, the pay is better
> than being a Classics prof - the amount of pay varies from school to
> school, and within each school from department to department, Classics
> usually being on the low end of the pay scale.
>
> From all of the visiting profs I have sought career advice from, it is
> not pleasant to have to move all your stuff every year to a new place
> where you are essentially treated as a substitute teacher for the
> regular professor who is on sabbatical. There's a lot of competition
> for tenure-track positions.
>
> I would talk to your own professors and graduate students in Classics
> departments and ask them about this. Grad students are especially the
> best for this kind of info, since they're looking out for future jobs
> themselves. I graduated about ten years ago and live in the United
> States, so conditions may be somewhat different now.
>
> When I am asked why I didn't go on to get my doctorate, I simply say:
> "There's no future in ancient history."
Jeez.. That's pretty scary. Thanks a lot for the advice though War Criminal.
Noch
"Edwin Menes" <hora...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3F99A7E3...@earthlink.net...
> Nearing retirement now, I've been watching and participating in hiring
> at the university level for a long time. My observations apply only to
> the United States. There are several ways to slice the question.
>
> First, it matters where you get your degree. To get a job here, you
> really need to have it from a USan or Canadian university, approximately
> 50 of which grant the PhD. Oxford and Cambridge graduates do not have
> the cachet they used to, primarily because we generally place equal
> emphasis on teaching and research and do not hire anyone without
> experience, at least as a teaching assistant. Canadian institutions of
> any sort are required by law to give preference to qualified Canadian
> citizens.
I'll be recieving my degree from the University of Sydney, Australia. I'm
most interested in working in Europe or South America.
> Second, Ancient History by itself will not get one very far. Not to
> harp on it, but how good are your Latin and Greek? Would you be able to
> teach courses in the texts of the ancient historians? Or from the other
> side, is antiquity the only period you know anything about? Here, in
> round numbers about half of Ancient History degrees are granted by
> Classics Depts., the other half by History Depts.
I'm starting my degree in 3 months (yes, I'm that young!), so I could direct
myself that way. I've done a bit of Latin and I'm interested - though I'd
rather learn Akkadian as an ancient language. Would that still be useful? Or
did you mean I should know both Greek and Latin well? I'm quite interested
in ancient Greece and Rome and the Mediteranean in general, however so many
people specialise in those areas that I thought I might be more unique and
thus more useful to somebody if I focused instead on the era of three
millennia BC in Mesopotamia or ancient South America.
As for other qualifications, I speak Spanish and I'll be learning to speak
French fluently. I also plan to take units from the History Dept. After uni
I'm planning on going overseas immediately (to either Spain, Italy, Greece,
France or Peru) to teach English. I don't know if those qualifications would
be acceptable however...
Chances are I'll be simultaneously trying to get a job translating or
interpreting for the UN - I seem to be trying to get into the hardest jobs
around don't I? Whichever one I get into first, I guess..
> Third, how interested are you in research and publication?
Immensely. I love learning. I have an insatiable thirst for it. :)
> Finally, I think very few people pursue Classics from a love of
> reputation or money. You do it for love and hope for the best.
Of course, but I'm planning on travelling often to lots of interesting
places, so I'm hoping to receive a wage that can adequately support my
adventures.
Thank you -very- much for your help.
Edwin Menes
and if so, at what level--or would museum curatorship and/or
conservation be more likely? I ask because I suspect you will have to
steer yourself in a given direction sooner than you (or I) might like.
Areas of interest get diced mighty fine before they appear in a
university setting. Logic aside, Ancient History generally means Greece
and Rome; Mesopotamia usually is part of Near Eastern history; and Egypt
has its own niche. Hittite usually groups with Mesopotamia. India,
China, and Japan should have their space too. I know, I know. The
civilizations at the eastern end of the Mediterranean interacted in ways
still underappreciated, but the unqualified term Ancient History in the
academic world is Greece and Rome. That's why I answered as I did (and
avoided the inclusion of prehistory--which does not mean cavemen but any
period before written records).
In the US, the call for Mesopotamiologists, Egyptologists, and their ilk
is mighty slim. As we say (tritely) in Chicago, Akkadian and $1.50 will
get you a ride on public transportation. The Classical world is still
felt to be somehow connected with our own history (though honored more
in the breach). Not so those other parts of the world. The continental
European university is sniffier than the average USan place in that the
divide between chairholders and the peons who do most of the actual
teaching is far greater, both economically and socially. (We're pretty
egalitarian here.) I've lived in Italy for extensive periods and talked
to many French, German, and Scandinavian academics, but the British
Isles are sui generis and I have no idea what South America is like.
But in Europe there is a living to be made and prestige to be gained by
teaching in the liceo/gymnasium/lyce'e/public school. You have to be
prepared to teach something these schools want taught, but there's
considerable freedom to pursue your own scholarly interests.
So much for teaching. The other possibilities I mentioned will need
some training in archaeology and art history, plus probably a year of
postgraduate work.
One of the premier institutions in the US for non-Classical eastern
Mediterranean is the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
The museum there, e.g., has the best Mesopotamian collection outside
Iraq. The university's website is http://www.uchicago.edu. There
should be links to the OI and perhaps better information than I have
provided.
Next, research and publication are not the same thing. Publication may
presume research (though one sometimes wonders) but research does not
inevitably lead to publication.
Finally, I hope my daughter will forgive my dragging her into this
discussion, but there are parallels. In high school she had four years
of Latin, three years of Greek, and a year of German. She did some
Latin and Greek in college, but her teachers seemed to have made it more
like the drudgery of constant translation than the liberating experience
I always found it, and she decided to major in English. Eventually her
interests shifted to Art History, in which she got her degree. In her
college years, she spent a semester studying in Rome. After graduation,
she went to Australia for a while, hoping to work (and having the
necessary papers) while there--not intending to emigrate, only to travel
to different parts of the Antipodes and to learn. While in that part of
the world she also did a short tour of China.
She liked my life, at least its superfices, with no real knowledge of
all that goes into it. Therefore, she decided to aim for an academic
career and is in fact now a graduate student in Art History, with an
emphasis on Classical art. But she is also very interested in the
Renaissance and Baroque and in Chinese and Japanese art, and there seems
to be no way in the USan academic world to combine these interests.
Also, her experience of academic people outside her undergrad experience
convinced her that she did not want to be one of them. She will finish
her M.A. and move on--even though her performance has exceeded that of
most PhD students in her department.
In off times, she has been back to Italy and Greece a couple of times.
Last summer she went to South America and did a backpack tour to Machu
Picchu (is that enough c's?). This Christmas she is going to Yucatan.
When school is finished in May, she hopes to go to Africa. We are not
wealthy people. My wife gets frequent flyer miles in abundance because
of her job and she has been generous with them for my daughter's airfare
to farflung places. But we have not contributed prodigious amounts to
these ventures. My daughter has used gifts, small bequests, and income
from waiting tables to invest in all this. She travels as cheaply and
humbly as possible, as did her mother and I (separately back then) when
we were her age.
When she graduates, her intention is to find a job teaching English in
China or Japan. She will have a healthy sum in student loans to repay,
though not so much as a lawyer or doctor in training. But she has
discovered that what she really wants to do is travel writing. It takes
a while for one's writing to mature. In the meantime, she travels.
ANYWAY, the obvious point is that it's going to take you a while to
decide what you really want to do. In the meantime you have to try out
a bunch of things. When you first asked your questions, I thought you
were already at University and were looking toward the next step.
As for supporting yourself through your adventures, you can always wait
tables--which is how my daughter did it. It used to be that
non-professional servers were likely to be unemployed actors and
actresses. Nowadays, at least in some parts of the city, they are as
likely to be graduate students supplementing their stipends.
Noch
> I guess the next question to ask is whether you really want to teach,
> and if so, at what level--or would museum curatorship and/or
> conservation be more likely? I ask because I suspect you will have to
> steer yourself in a given direction sooner than you (or I) might like.
> Areas of interest get diced mighty fine before they appear in a
> university setting.
I've thought about museum curatorship before. I'm really not sure - things
are looking even more confusing now, actually. I'm about as interested in
teaching at university level as I am in all my other options. I'm quite sure
I don't want to end up teaching in a highschool environment, -unless- I get
to do it in a European country.
> Logic aside, Ancient History generally means Greece
> and Rome; Mesopotamia usually is part of Near Eastern history; and Egypt
> has its own niche. Hittite usually groups with Mesopotamia. India,
> China, and Japan should have their space too. I know, I know. The
> civilizations at the eastern end of the Mediterranean interacted in ways
> still underappreciated, but the unqualified term Ancient History in the
> academic world is Greece and Rome. That's why I answered as I did (and
> avoided the inclusion of prehistory--which does not mean cavemen but any
> period before written records).
I'd be happy dedicating myself to any of those areas. I always assumed
Greece and Rome had been overdone. Am I wrong?
Thankyou again for your replies - you've been incredibly helpful.
slunk
> Greece and Rome had been overdone. Am I wrong?
There's always work to be done on Greece and Rome. Once you start
post-graduate study you'll start seeing gaps that you might want to fill.
For example, some post-grad friends and myself were debating Cicero today
and pondered the question of, if Cicero had a secret handshake, such as
between himself and Pompey, what would it be.
Robert Stonehouse
He would scratch his head with one finger (of the other hand, of
course) while doing it.
Noch
Joe Bernstein
Noch <euri...@hotmail.com> wrote:
(Pause to wonder first: were all the eurydice* names already taken,
or is there an intention in that?)
> > I guess the next question to ask is whether you really want to teach,
> > and if so, at what level--or would museum curatorship and/or
> > conservation be more likely? I ask because I suspect you will have to
> > steer yourself in a given direction sooner than you (or I) might like.
I knew a guy at the University of Chicago who decided to go into
Egyptology in our freshman year. I had no reason to think things
would go nearly so well for someone who made that decision later.
On the other hand, I know of at least one person who gets lots of
books published in Egyptology though his own formal training was in
English (I don't respect his work, but that's another story); and
someone somewhat similar appears below.
> I've thought about museum curatorship before. I'm really not sure -
> things are looking even more confusing now, actually.
I'd like to think there were jobs out there other than museum
curatorship and teaching, but I sure haven't thought of any.
I personally don't have anything like The Usual Qualifications. I've
done a fair amount of work related to ancient history in recent years,
but with (for example) none of the relevant languages. So it's not as
though I'd been *trying* to think of ways I could turn my decidedly
inferior equipment into a living. But I think if those ways were
growing on trees, I'd have thought of more by now.
And sure enough, I have! One can be some sort of tour guide at a
historic site or a museum. This may not be well paid but I can't
think of any reason why it wouldn't be a respectably interesting
sort of job; it'd be like having lots of one-day students, some of
whom would be more interested than the average freshman but most
of whom would be a bit worse prepared. Separately but not that
far away, there's archaeology. You definitely don't have to be
university-affiliated to do archaeology, although you can't build
a career in it just by volunteering at a lot of digs either.
Well, this isn't a *lot* of progress, but it's some.
> > Logic aside, Ancient History generally means Greece and Rome;
> > Mesopotamia usually is part of Near Eastern history; and Egypt
> > has its own niche. Hittite usually groups with Mesopotamia. India,
> > China, and Japan should have their space too.
This certainly describes the University of Chicago. I haven't seen
Akkadian taught elsewhere, nor Egyptian. Hmmm. Hadn't thought
about the university I'm posting from; let's see.
After *much* digging, I turned up a "Department of Hebrew and
Semitic Studies". It claims to offer "Elements of Akkadian",
but nothing more, and not this year; this year its only "Other
Semitic Language" is Syriac. It also has two-semester classes
in Aramaic and in Ugaritic. There is a "Comparative Semitic
Philology" course, and I"m betting they're on a four-year rotation,
one course each semester.
Its web page claims that the Linguistics department does Hittite,
and the Classics department Egyptian. This makes *gobs* of sense
to me but is, institutionally, utterly bizarre; it's basically what
you can expect, I snidely remark, when you don't bother to have an
Oriental Institute. Seriously, the University of Wisconsin is
considered a power in South Asian and African studies, perhaps
also East Asian, and is building in Central Asian; it would be a
serious violation of How Things Work for it also to be solid in
the Near East. In this spirit I note that the links to the two
departments in question are both outdated, one enough so that it
doesn't redirect.
The Classics department indeed does claim to offer four semesters
of Egyptian, but this semester all they have is a survey of the
civilisation, taught by Barry Powell, a classicist who is not an
Egyptologist. On the faculty list he claims Egyptology as an
interest, and is the only faculty member who does; my guess is
that he'd be teaching the language classes if they were on offer
this year.
The Linguistics department has some profoundly confused web pages,
which say nothing about Hittite. But when I searched on that word
through the entire university's servers, I did turn up a single
semester class in Hittite which was in the three biennial Graduate
Course Catalogs *prior* to the current one.
> I'd be happy dedicating myself to any of those areas. I always assumed
> Greece and Rome had been overdone. Am I wrong?
I can't really say, being an outsider, but for whatever it's worth,
here's an outsider's take on it:
1. Unless Greece and Rome are utterly unlike any other area in the
world where archaeology has been done, there is work to be done
publishing the results of archaeological digs whose principal
diggers were evil enough not to do it themselves. The catch is
that since handing the job over to someone else amounts to a
confession that you're scum of the earth (seriously; but I'll spare
you the rant on why, for this post), nobody does it; it's done for
them when they die. So you'd always be working on information written
by people you can't ask about it, that's decades old. Another major
catch is that there isn't much *money* for publishing archaeological
sites - funders are at least as blindly vile as diggers in this regard
- so even if you could convince someone to support you while you did
it, e.g. a university department of something or other, they wouldn't
be very happy with you.
2. Until quite recently, it could truthfully be said that tons of
elementary work remained to be done in editing, translating, and
commenting upon the surviving texts. Nowadays there's less, and
it's possible that by the time you got a degree there'd be still
less. You might not be able to count on this to support a lifetime
of work.
Basically, there are two major, major lacunae in the philological
work of Classics. The more technical something is, the less likely
it is that it's been properly dealt with: there are philosophers
who are only now being translated, though I suspect they already
had decent editions; I know Galen remains a vast wasteland. Also,
and this tends to reinforce the first thing, the later something is,
the less likely it is to have been properly dealt with. This is the
lacuna that's been getting filled in huge quantities over the last
decade or so, though. Most of the remaining obvious needs for the
non-Christian periods remain because they're more or less hard (such
as Galen). Early Christianity is in considerably worse shape, but
as just one indicator, I'd have said about a fifth of the stuff I
knew of and was interested in had been translated, as of 1996; now
the number is more like four fifths.
If you found that you just *loved* Greek or Latin, though, so much
so that you could give up the "ancient history" connection, you could
find untold riches of work awaiting you in the *later* Christian periods.
3. There's a lot of stuff whose, um, usefulness is not immediately
obvious, being published in Classics, these days; but there's also a
lot of real, and not especially trivial, stuff. I haven't heard that
any Classics department was shutting its doors to new Ph.D. students
on the ground that everything had been done already. Just one
example from a different field of my interests: There are syntheses
of Roman rule in some provinces, but not all.
And now on a completely different note. There *does* remain an
absurdly large amount of work in *lots* of other areas. Classics
isn't completely finished, but there's a lot more been done already
in it than in most others. Since you're primarily interested in the
ancient, I guess I'll refrain from citing the desperate state of
Syriac and Irish, and concentrate on the ancient Near East.
With the exception of Egyptology, the ancient Near East is, as
a discipline, called Assyriology. And the talk in Assyriology for
the past couple of decades has been that the field is dying. They
look at *Classics* as the picture of health, a field full of happy
grad students excited about their work who have good job prospects
for after they get their degrees. Now, it can be argued that this
is basically because Assyriologists have been getting cut off from
their sites. Digging without publishing is evil, but if you don't
dig, it's fairly clear that you ultimately don't thrive. So as one
country after another has closed its doors due to xenophobia, war,
or both, the Assyriologists have suffered. The problems with this
explanation are two: 1) In many cases, the closures are country-
specific (for example, non-Americans have been digging in Iraq for
all this time); but the discipline's hard times are not country-
specific. 2) There's no sign in the news headlines that the closures
are going to improve soon; in the recent past they've gotten worse.
So even if this explanation were the whole story, it wouldn't mean
that you'd be justified going into Assyriology with hope and vigour.
But if you did it, there'd be a *lot* of work to do.
Hope all this helped.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>