Religious Studies Beyond the Discipline

On the Future of a Humanities Ph.D.

Buch | Hardcover

148 Seiten

2024
Equinox Publishing Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-80050-543-8 (ISBN)

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The aim for the volume is to initiate and then move forward a conversation among future, current, and recent graduate students as well as those who train them concerning the content, process, and purpose of acquiring advanced research skills in the early twenty-first century university.

Given the continued challenges that face the higher education job market in the Humanities in North America, this multi authored volume offers (i) a critical assessment of the current situation of Humanities doctoral students, early career scholars, and those now working in doctoral degree-granting institutions in the U.S. along with (ii) concrete proposals for a way forward. In turn, these proposals (iii) are the starting point for constructive reflections by faculty now working in leading American doctoral programs. The aim for the volume is therefore to initiate and then move forward a conversation among future, current, and recent graduate students as well as those who train them concerning the content, process, and purpose of acquiring advanced research skills in the early twenty-first century university. For this is a time when most everyone in higher ed. knows that a decreasing few who earn these degrees will ever attain work as tenured faculty members while an ever increasing number will, instead, end up either in perpetually insecure contingent faculty positions or, for a variety of reasons, will opt to seek careers outside academia, where the explicit relevance of their training is, at least at present, uncertain and uncharted. The volume asks what the role of these students' faculty, supervisors, degree programs, and Departments ought to be in helping them-and thereby helping these doctoral programs themselves, along with their affiliated faculty-to excel in an economic, and sometimes political, environment that is often not kind to scholarship in the Humanities.

Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).

Foreword

Raj
Balkaran

Preface

Russell
T. McCutcheon

Introduction

Russell
T. McCutcheon

Context

1.
“The University Absolutely Had Nothing in Place…”: Life After
Grad School with Bradley Sommer

Jacob
Barrett, Erica Bennett and Bradley Sommer

2.
“A Series of Decisions Which Are Going to Affect You Over Time…”:
Life After Grad School with Pamela Gilbert

Jacob
Barrett, Erica Bennett and Pamela Gilbert

3.
“What I’m Doing is Pivoting My Career…”: Life After Grad
School with Jared Powell

Jacob
Barrett, Erica Bennett and Jared Powell

4.
“Be Thoughtful About What Skills You’re Developing…”: Life
After Grad School with Shannon Trosper Schorey

Jacob
Barrett, Erica Bennett and Shannon Trosper Schorey

Manifesto

5.
Religious Studies Beyond the Discipline: On Earning and Awarding a
Humanities Ph.D.

Andrew
Ali Aghapour, Shannon Trosper Schorey, Thomas J. Whitley, Vaia Touna
and Russell T. McCutcheon

Responses

6.
The Future of an Illusion

Barbara
R. Ambros and Randall Styers

7.
A Response to the Manifesto

David
Frankfurter

8.
In the Best Scenario…

Martin
Kavka

9.
The Way We Lived Then and Now: The Ph.D. and its Employments

Richard
A. Rosengarten

Afterword

Emily
Crews

Appendices

Appendix
1: Tracking Doctoral Graduates in the Study of Religion

Russell
T. McCutcheon

Appendix
2: SBL/AAR Position Advertisements, 2001-2019 Russell
T. McCutcheon

Erscheint lt. Verlag	30.11.2024
Reihe/Serie	NAASR Working Papers
Zusatzinfo	1 figure
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	263 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Erwachsenenbildung
ISBN-10	1-80050-543-4 / 1800505434
ISBN-13	978-1-80050-543-8 / 9781800505438
Zustand	Neuware