Why?
I created this blog for those of us (Mid East History PhD’s and ABD’s) who are on the academic job market, in an attempt to formalize the informal rumor mill through which most job market and postdoc applicants find out whether they've been accepted or rejected. I was inspired by another blog named (IR Rumor mill) http://irrumormill.blogspot.com/ and have shamelessly copied some of their organization formatting.Obviously it is up to you to contribute to this site with information about jobs and to spread the word to other friends and acquaintances who are in the job market (in 2007/2008). I will do my best to post the different positions as they open up (my main sources are MESA, the AHA, h-net, the chronicler and higher-ed) As most of you know, the academic job market is highly imperfect and information is extremely scarce (especially for us).With your help this site can help answer some of these questions:
-Who was invited to what job interview?
-Who was offered a job?Did they accept or decline?
-Which positions are closed or postponed?
-What position(s) have an inside candidate? -Etc.
(Simply Add your comments to the jobs listed in this blog)
What's the purpose of this?
To formalize the informal rumor mill through which most job market applicants find out whether they've been accepted or rejected. This has been done in other fields, including Internation Relations. See Chronicle of Higher Education.
What will you be posting?
Job listings that specify Middle East History as one of the target fields will be posted here.
If you have a job listing that we don't have, please email us or leave a comment on that post. Once shortlists are generated (and we are informed about them), those will also be posted as individual entries. So please contribute!
How can I contribute?
-If you have a rumor regarding job or fellowship offers that have been made already, post a comment to the appropriate Job entry.
-If you have information about a job that we don't have on a list, post it to the the appropriate List entry.
-If you have more specific information on a job already posted (what a particular department is looking for, the makeup of the search committee, etc.), post a comment to that specific entry.
-What are the comment posting rules? How can I be anonymous?
Please keep your comments short and informative. The idea is to post information, not opinions.
Anonymous comments are the default! However, some participants have chosen to use persistent pseudonyms instead of submitting anonymous comments so that the community can get a better sense of the veracity of the rumors. Just select "Other" when you leave your comment and type in your pseudonym. Even better, create an account on blogger.com (owned by Google, so you may want to grab the namespace in any case!) and your pseudonym will be password-protected.
Who are you guys, anyway?
Members of the discipline who have decided that the existing job market does an extremely poor job of letting candidates know where they are in the process.
Can I join you?
The best way to contribute by sharing whatever information you have with us through comments or emails.
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4 comments:
This is a great idea. Thanks!
Thanks…I think it gives us more information about the whole process and hopefully more flexibility and peace-of-mind. Though for the whole process to work as intended, we must all post all the “rumors” we can. It works really well in the IR blog (they have been running it for a couple of years now).
The market looks good again this year...it’s still very early and there are already a dozen+ tenure track jobs. After MESA we will know more from the first wave of conference interviews (followed by the AHA of course).
Good luck to all…
It depends where you are applying. Your odds of landing say an NYU job if you are a
Lewis-fan is diminished but so are your chances if you are a Sa‘idian applying to Princeton (NES). I suspect that in most of the jobs that are out there, your “politics” don’t matter that much. It’s the places with well established Middle East programs that might care about such things. Either way, as an up and coming tenure track scholar, I don’t think it is a good idea to wear your philosophical point of view on your sleeves. Publish good scholarship and don’t rock the boat too much until you are tenured. Personally I think academics should at least make an effort at being less ideological and grouping ourselves into camps is not the way to do it.
I agree with HistoryPhD: "grouping ourselves into camps is not the way to do it."
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