Reframing the PhD: Centering Students in a Changing Humanities Landscape

I write this introduction as a faculty member who advises and teaches graduate students but primarily as the director of a humanities center who works closely with graduate students in a variety of non-curricular settings including supporting public humanities and community-engaged projects. We have known for a long time that students need to develop capacities beyond those traditionally acquired in graduate school as well as be able to articulate their skills and value to a wider range of employers. Over the last decade or so, the structures in place for graduate school in the humanities have been rethought and reworked, assisted by major grant funding, and a slew of writing has been produced on the topic. 

Our students, for the most part, enter graduate school with a different mindset than many of the faculty advising and teaching them. In part, of course, this mindset is shaped by the realities of the faculty job market and now by the intensified attacks on both the university and on the principles upon which 21st century humanistic research and education rest. But our graduate students are also informed by a different set of research interests and methodologies (digital, community-engaged, collaborative, equity-driven) that often exceed the boundaries of traditional academic humanism and seek to engage with what Stacy Hartman calls “the humanities ecosystem”: an expansive area of research and praxis that includes the purely academic but that is not limited by it. 

A large subset of our graduate students wishes to root their research in collaborative and community-engaged practices and public humanities methods that, with exceptions, many previous generations of scholars did not pursue. This does not imply a dilution of scholarly rigor—a frequently aired preoccupation amongst some faculty members—but rather speaks to an expansion of publics and interlocutors beyond the academic, a praxis of co-creation and collaboration, a reparative and equity-driven mindset, and an engagement with new archives and sources and methods. Even when students are permitted to pursue such work, it is often perceived as an “add on,” something that a student must do on their own time, which has, of course, major implications for equity across graduate student populations. But programs rarely require students to train in these methods, thus implying—wrongly—that public engagement and collaboration are divorced from entrenched ideas about what constitutes research.

This compartmentalizing may be because faculty often believe they can only teach and advise in the same way they were trained. But we have, in fact, all the necessary tools to adapt to this already long-standing reality: we know how to research new topics and learn new skills, how to convene conversations and exchanges of ideas, how to invite experts of many kinds to campus. Using these tools, we can invite our students to be active participants in developing the new capacities many of them are clamoring for. 

Faculty must also train students to navigate and understand the university and its operations—the “hidden curriculum”—so that they may be full partners in shaping their own research projects and outcomes but also in acquiring the skills to enact needed change in the academy. At best, this training could take the form of internships or shadowing in the university’s many administrative spaces that would also serve as career development. But advisers can also take it upon themselves to give students a wider sense of how the humanities ecosystem functions. Mentoring is, of course, key to this understanding, but faculty—who primarily fulfill this role as dissertation advisers, committee members, and directors of graduate studies—need more systematic training in best practices. Students, who are often disadvantaged by the opacity around these relationships, need to be made aware of what they can and should expect from a faculty mentor and, significantly, how to build a broader network of mentors, including peer mentors, alumni, and non-scholarly collaborators. Indeed, more formal structures for graduate student mentorship that include a wider array of those within the humanities ecosystem can only serve to better apprise students of the many possibilities their degree may lead to, and how.

Graduate students increasingly turn to spaces within the universities beyond their departments to access a more robust and expansive humanities education. What Katina Rogers calls “central” and “nonevaluative” spaces, such as humanities centers, writing centers, libraries, outreach centers, and career centers, have experienced staff members with the expertise to expand students’ training and capacities (Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 79). Hartman and Strakovsky argue that these and other spaces fulfill a broadly conceived curricular function that they call “acculturation,” of which “coursework is only part of the process” (Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem, 22). This expansive conception of graduate student education should not, however, lead to overloaded students or advisers who grumble about their advisees’ time away from academic research. Instead, a humanities ecosystem mindset can only serve to enhance our students’ trajectories and their well-being.

Here I have curated a list of writings and a video that promote the idea of enabling students to advocate for themselves and their research, praxis, and methodological interests and for their well-being and futures. The texts collected here speak to the limitations of the traditional academic job market but also to the exciting and generative possibilities of a future within a broader humanities ecosystem. They offer creative and, above all, collaborative ways of thinking about the PhD and its outcomes, breaking down the binary thinking that divides public and community-engaged research and practice from the more traditionally understood academic humanities, and emphasizing the importance of an expansive view of mentoring that speaks to a new way of thinking of graduate education as a co-creation.