Shami Ghosh, last
updated June 2016
It’s late in the
fall; you’re a bright if no-longer so young grad student completing a
dissertation on some suitably obscure topic in medieval studies, and you’re
thinking about how you’re going to get food on the table next year. H-Net lists a bunch of jobs, all either
highly unattractive or über-prestigious; the only option seems to be the slave
market. But wait: don’t you know someone who got a postdoc somewhere? Two years
(or more) of research, no teaching (or very little): that sounds like a sweet
deal. I want to get me one of those, you think, and you start looking around.
Well, if you’ve just landed on this website as a result, without ever before
having given any thought or effort to planning for the postdoc, let me tell you
one thing to start with: you’re almost certainly doing this too late. Unlike in
the sciences, there aren’t too many postdocs in the humanities (though there
are more than most people seem to be aware of); and—again unlike in the
sciences—humanities postdocs have strict deadlines, the ones in North America
tend to be based on specific themes (more on this below), and generally the
granting organisations do not give postdocs to people who submit a research
proposal that isn’t substantially different from the dissertation. Be aware
also that postdocs don’t always go to the best scholars: being good, but
insufficiently ambitious (and thus not having thought enough about your marketability),
can be a hindrance. I was very lucky: over two years, I applied for
twenty-seven (yes, 27; I admit, that might be a tad extreme…), and I got two.
But it took me literally months to do the research on these things, and months
to put together all the applications. And I know several people who are as good
or better scholars, but didn’t get a postdoc: insufficient planning,
insufficient ambition, insufficient arrogance, or a combination of those three
qualities. It’s sad, but true: these days, the ‘slow
food’ approach to scholarship probably won’t get you anywhere (beyond good
scholarship and, perhaps, some wisdom); a good sales pitch will (at least to
some extent), though it will also have to be backed up by good scholarship.
Since I collected
a large amount of information on the process, and since from chatting with
people I’ve got the impression that many simply don’t know where to begin, I’ve
put together a bunch of tips; I have also made liberal use of Linda Hutcheon’s
excellent webpages, available here; let
me stress that her pages are an extremely useful resource for you, even
if you do nothing remotely related to comp lit or English—they don’t have that
much on postdocs, but you will eventually want to apply for a job, and these
pages walk you through the process in a very helpful manner.
If you’re not
interested in my advice, just scroll down to the last section of this page, and
you’ll find more links to various sources of information and places that offer
postdocs (I’ve listed over forty-five postdocs plus those offered by the
Oxbridge colleges); to begin with, if Canadian or a permanent resident of
Canada, you should know about the SSHRC
postdoc and the Banting
Fellowships; for Oxbridge, go here
and here; for Mellons (some), and
other listings of potential opportunities, look at Hutcheon’s page on postdocs here,
and the site provided by Berkeley; and also
look at the general job listings sites: H-Net’s
job guide; jobs.ac.uk. Do remember that
things change, including URLs, and postdocs that exist now may not do so later;
I try and update this site periodically with new information, but I don’t
and can’t check each time that all the links are still working. (Note that
though the current page is written by a medievalist from the University of
Toronto, it is intended to be useful for medievalists from elsewhere too, and
the advice will hopefully be helpful for those in other fields of the
humanities as well; almost all the postdocs listed are for all humanities
fields. Note, however, that I have not listed postdocs restricted to fields in
such a way that medievalists cannot apply.)
Apart from
Hutcheon’s website, much of the advice on this page stems not just from my own
research, but also from various workshops put on for early career researchers
at different institutions, and most importantly, conversations with others,
both my peers and my teachers, of whom I would especially like to thank Andy
Orchard and Lawrin Armstrong; without Andy’s advice in particular, I would
never have had much of a chance at anything, and if there is any wisdom in the
following paragraphs, it is owed to him (though obviously I alone am
responsible for the content of this site; don’t blame anyone else if I depress you
or lead you astray).
1. Plan
ahead—WAY ahead
The worst thing
you can do in this game is leave it till you’re almost graduating. Unless
you’re absolutely brilliant at putting together outstanding applications for
things very fast and have very understanding referees who are equally
brilliant at putting together their letters very fast (and still writing good
letters), you should start working on your postdoc applications at least 15
months before you would take up the post; 18 months would be better. There are
many reasons for this:
– The deadlines
for the SSHRC, most Mellons, and most of the Oxbridge postdocs, fall between
August and the beginning of December, for a position starting between July and
September the following year; almost all the deadlines will be before the end
of December.
– Almost
invariably, you need a solid research proposal that is different from what you
did for your dissertation; unless you already have a portfolio of abandoned
projects filed for future reference, you’ll need to take some time to come up
with a good proposal.
– For Mellons,
and some other postdocs, you will need to provide outlines of courses you can
teach and some sort of teaching portfolio. Your years of teaching experience
might make this seem easy, but in some cases you will be expected to teach
courses that you have not defined, and might include material far outside your
field; and you will also be expected to design new courses from scratch. In
such cases, you will be judged at least partly on the basis of how much thought
you’ve put into preparing your teaching statement to cater to what you will
have to do at that specific institution.
– You may not
know what sort of research proposal you need to put together, and what theme
you might have to try and speak to (more on this below) until you’ve seen the
adverts; you need to give yourself time to scour the websites and get familiar
with the sort of things that are out there, so that you also have time to tweak
your proposal so that it fits with the institution or theme.
– Since it’s
something new, you need to give your referees time to read your proposal and
tailor their letters accordingly.
– In the case of
the SSHRC, and a number of other fellowships, you need a ‘host’ to write a
letter from the institution where you want to hold the postdoc; you will need
some time to get in touch with and introduce yourself to your prospective host,
and you need to give them some time to familiarise themselves with your past
work and plans for the future—since their letter is often the crucial factor,
do not delay this too long.
– Putting
together all the stuff takes time and energy; if you’re simultaneously in the
middle of writing the last chapters of your dissertation, you will have very
little of either.
– There is an
increasing trend to moving all aspects of the applications online, and
unfortunately computer systems don’t always work too well. For one of the
fellowships I applied to (for which I needed to arrange for five references), I
had several days of three-way correspondence between tech support, myself, and
a referee; my referee finally had to email the letter to tech support and get
them to input it. If you’re doing all this at the last minute, it might just
not get done—and even if it does, the amount of stress is just not worth it.
These are all
good reasons to start working on your postdoc applications
eighteen months in advance; you’ll have enough time to put together a couple of
draft proposals, consult with your referees, and thus be prepared to put things
together faster when the adverts start coming out. But if you’re really serious
about getting a postdoc, you need to start planning for them from even
earlier, to make sure that when you start putting together the applications,
you stand a chance. This is because:
– Postdocs are
ridiculously competitive, and most often you’re competing with people from all
kinds of fields, not just your own (more on all this below)—so you need to make
sure you have at least one publication. In other words, if you’re
getting hassled in year three by your looming major field exam, and you decide
that, well, even though Prof. X was full of praise for that paper you wrote and
has been encouraging you to revise it for publication, you don’t feel you have the
three months you need to do a good job, so you’ll just let it wait till later
and focus on the exam and the dissertation for now—well, this decision will
probably do a lot to help you preserve your sanity, your health, your
relationship, your temper, your sense of humour, your hair; but it will
certainly not help you get that postdoc. It’s a sad fact, but very true:
ambition often reaps greater rewards than quality (or happiness and sufficient
sleep), and while it may not be the best (or healthiest) scholars who get
postdocs, it generally is the most ambitious ones.
– Postdocs are
ridiculously competitive (I have said it twice; but I don’t mean to discourage
you). It might sound odd, given that a tenure-track job is a much bigger
investment for a university, but it’s not that odd if you think about it: to
begin with, major (or even middle-rank) research universities rarely hire
anyone right out of a PhD. So those jobs, which are certainly really hard to
get, are probably not on your radar screen anyway. Secondly, a job is
invariably advertised for a particular field; you will be competing against
others in your own field. There are, of course, differences between an
advertisement for a medieval historian of Europe specialising in the period
800–1200, placed by a large history department that already has four medieval
historians, and one from the humanities programme of a liberal arts college
seeking someone teaching English literature before Shakespeare, or pre-1700
European history, or ‘medieval studies’. But even in the latter cases, you will
be competing against either scholars of medieval English literature like
yourself, or scholars of European history before 1700, or at least medievalists
of some sort; it is unlikely that the field of applicants will be significantly
over about 150 if that. And while European history before 1700 covers a large
period, a good deal of it is the middle ages, and even if you are a
Merovingianist, you know already that you have to be able to teach the
fifteenth century; even if you’re a hardcore Anglo-Saxonist, you can surely
manage some Chaucer; and whatever your field, as a medievalist you should be
able to teach general stuff on ‘medieval civilisation’. A postdoc, on the other
hand, will typically be in the humanities, or liberal arts; some Oxbridge
postdocs are more specific, but even the most specialised of those will almost
invariably be something like ‘art history’, or ‘British history’, or ‘modern
languages’. These are, however, still very broad categories, with a much wider
range of potential competition than you would get for most jobs, and hey, it’s
Oxbridge, that’s crazily competitive anyway (about ninety per cent of the
Oxbridge fellowships go to people with some Oxbridge background, even if it’s
an undergraduate degree). The Mellon postdocs at Yale and Columbia, which are
not limited by themes, regularly get 900+ applications for one to three
fellowships; even the Oxbridge postdocs that are somewhat restricted by field
will receive easily 200+ applications for one fellowship. So you’re competing
against a broad range of people in all kinds of humanities subjects, many of
which will often sound a lot more ‘relevant’ than anything medieval.
– Postdocs are
ridiculously competitive (I have said it thrice; what I tell you three times is
true). Certainly, they’re way harder than the more normal first step: the slave
market of sessional lecturing. Typically, if you don’t get a postdoc, you will
start with a contract job for a year or two, move to a tenure-track job at a
place you might not particularly want to be at, and thence to the university of
your dreams (or at least one where you might not mind spending the rest of your
life). Some people will be lucky enough to skip the first step, but if you want
a job at a major or even mid-level research university, unless your cv looks
good enough for a postdoc anyway, you’re extremely unlikely to get the job
you’ll (want to) stay in for a long time. It makes sense, if you like research
and want to aim for a plum job later on, to try and get a postdoc; but given
the competitiveness, if you really want one of these, you have to plan way
ahead to make sure you’ve got a decent chance. That means, returning to my
earlier point, getting some publications. The likelihood of getting a
fellowship without at least one publication is very slim indeed, probably
non-existent; the chance of getting one without at least some good
conference presentations is certainly non-existent (unless you have a
very heavy-weight patron backing you). And by ‘good conference presentation’, I
do not mean the zoo: Kalamazoo doesn’t quite count for nothing, but it’s pretty
close. You don’t need to aim for a paper in Anglo-Saxon England or Past
and Present or Speculum; just a solid publication or two in a solid journal
(not one devoted solely to graduate student papers) will (hopefully) do the
trick. How to do this? Well, I can’t go into all of that right now—how to get
published is a topic that deserves a page of its own, which Linda Hutcheon has
once again provided here—but
to begin with, you need to know the literature in your field well enough to
know if what you’ve written is worth revising for publication; then you need to
make sure you get advice from as many other knowledgeable people—professors and
peers—as you can, about your paper, about how you can make it the best paper
possible, and about where you can place it; and then you need to work your ass
off to try and get it accepted. And if it’s not accepted with the first try, don’t
give up: use the reviewers’ reports, think hard (but not too long), revise,
and resubmit. But remember: it’s the hard work and ambition that will count
here, not the fact that you’re able to have a life.
All of this
sounds like a lot of work, eh? IT IS! But whoever said you’d actually have a
life once you got into grad school? If you lose your mind during this whole
process, don’t worry: given that you’ve chosen to be a professional medievalist
(a medievalist for God’s sake!), you can’t be all that sane anyway. So:
start thinking about career options, including postdocs, as soon as you advance
to candidacy, if not earlier. See, in this context, the advice on Linda
Hutcheon’s job
search page: she suggests that you should start thinking about things,
submitting papers, and going to conferences, two years before you complete; but
given that jobs are often advertised as late as six months before start of
tenure, and often do not require a detailed proposal for the next project,
whereas postdocs both require such a proposal, and also are often advertised as
much as a year before start of tenure, start planning for the postdoc three
years before you want to start it! Adapting Hutcheon’s timeline, three
years before when you plan to complete your PhD, you should probably begin a
little folder in which you store ideas for potential future projects, seminar
papers that could be revised for publication (with some notes on what sort of
revision they would need), names and locations of potential postdoc
supervisors, places where your sort of research is likely to be supported. No
later than two years before completion, you should really start submitting
stuff for publication (so that you have a chance of being able to say
‘forthcoming’ by the time you apply), and you should also, as you gear up to
writing the dissertation, begin to think of the bits that can’t or won’t go
into it, but could be suitable follow-up projects and could be worked into a
postdoc research proposal. You should also think carefully about the potential
possibilities of papers you’ve written that would take a year to revise for
publication, and might lead to additional spin-offs: not the sort of thing you
want to do while working on a dissertation, but potentially great for a postdoc
and a postdoc proposal. Yes, it’s all a lot of work, and it’s all very
stressful, and the chances are not that great anyway; let me add, though, that
as with publications, don’t give up if you don’t get one on the first try:
apart from Oxbridge, you’re generally eligible to apply for these things within
two to five years of completing the PhD, so try again next year if it didn’t
work this time.
2. Marketing
strategy
Let’s face it:
you’re a medievalist; you’re not sexy. No, I don’t mean you personally; I mean
the research you do. After all, when you’re competing for a fellowship and you
have as competition the heavy from Cambridge with the proposal on ‘Postcolonial
parallels: political pragmatism in post-cold war pseudo-pornographic prose’,
and the bright young thing from Columbia who wants to work on ‘Slums,
subalternity and the sublime: social exclusion and religious sites of
resistance in Rio and Santiago’, do you really have a chance with a
Toronto PhD and a proposal titled: ‘The Old English glosses and marginalia in
Cambridge, Corpus Christi Add. Ms. 42: an edition and commentary’ (and it’s not
just the lack of alliteration that could make this one sound more boring)? This
lack of sexiness is yet another reason why it is crucially important for you to
look impressive in terms of publications and make sure you get outstanding
references—but you should also try and jazz up the research proposal a little
bit. Don’t bullshit too much: you’ll get found out. But try and make
yourself accessible, and interesting, to people who know squat about what you
do, and really couldn’t care less. So, for example, you might find it expedient
to talk less about the lengths of ascenders and descenders and the open-topped
‘a’ as means of identifying which sections of the afore-mentioned glosses were
written by the scribe Earconbert, and which by the hitherto anonymous scribe
who you suspect might be the monk Ecgfrith (and restrain your excitement at the
possibility that this would mean you have identified a second work written by
said Ecgfrith, who is thought to be known otherwise only as the putative composer
of that strange and mysterious poem with the incipit Whan Cnut Cyng the
Witan Wold enfeoff); perhaps the mysteries of the possibly missing quire
shouldn’t get too much press (though you’re probably right that it might—or
might not—have contained a lost vernacular saga about Hengest, the knowledge of
which would completely change our understanding of many things, or perhaps only
of Gildas); and you might also want to tone down the exhilaration you
justifiably feel about how these marginalia provide a whole new way of thinking
about the dating of Easter in England c. 700. (And of course, the significance
of the shelf mark of your manuscript should be left aside for lighter moments
at the interview.) These are all important things, I know, and should be mentioned
at some point; but you might want let your mind play with keywords like
‘cultural translation’; ‘the multi-ethnic/multi-cultural middle ages’;
‘religious conflict and political order’; and use what comes out of reflection
on these themes. Your audience might find it a tad easier to relate to you if
you do so… (Before the Anglo-Saxonists start getting offended, let me point out
that one of my proposals had the following title: ‘A commentary on book IX of
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival’; I make no claims to sexiness of any
sort for myself, and I’m taking aim at the OE crowd only because, well, there
are just so many of you here that you make an all too obvious target. And
before any of my readers who are not medievalists start feeling too smug: do
remember, my dear modernists, that in the larger scheme of things, you too are
insignificant: your research is not going to make oodles of profits for anyone,
so you don’t really matter either, however much you might like to think you
do.)
A little bit of
tweaking can be especially useful, even absolutely necessary, when you apply
for a themed fellowship. Many of the Mellon fellowships have a single theme for
the year; let’s say, the theme is something like ‘Performance and spectacle’.
Now, you work on medieval English aristocrats, not passion plays. But can’t you
come up with something plausible on ‘The performance of politics at the
Plantagenet court’ with or without a subtitle: ‘A Bakhtinian approach’? You may
not really need to talk that much about performance when you get down to your
research; but you need to try and find a way to make what you do somehow
appealing to a broad group of people who will be able to link it, somehow, to
what they do. To give another example: the theme at Cornell
some years ago was ‘Networks/Mobilities’. Isn’t there some way in which you can
fit in Ecgfrith’s glosses and marginalia into the concept of ideas moving
around in cultural networks in early medieval Europe? Weren’t there some
important churchmen around in Old England who came from exotic southern locales
and knew some Greek (and possibly brought, along with southern ideas about the
dating of Easter to the Celtic Church, a taste for fine southern wines and olive
oil to the lard-eating, beer-drinking bearded barbarians of the north)? Even if
none of this is really going to be the focus of your work (after all, there are
those open-topped ‘a’s to attend to; and Ecgfrith probably preferred ale—or
mead?—anyway, Theodore’s influence notwithstanding), you could highlight this
aspect of your manuscript in your proposal, showing how it is evidence of a
trans-European cultural network in early medieval England. In fact, it’s not
hard to think of a way for many medieval topics to relate to networks and
mobility: people travelled, ideas moved, Irish monks ended up in Italy, vikings
sailed down the Volga, Dutch farmers ate Polish grain. Latin, after all, was
not the native language of Icelanders: there’s got to be some sort of tie-in
with networks and mobility right there. In other words, although there isn’t
always a way to fit your interests to the theme, but often enough, it is indeed
possible with a little bit of creativity and thought: so don’t give up the
moment you see the theme for the year you graduate.
The need to tweak
exists not just for themed fellowships: in all cases, your application will be
read by a committee, on which it is not bloody likely (unless it’s Oxford or
Cambridge, where the colleges normally do have an external ‘expert’ appraiser)
that there will be anyone who knows the first thing about your subject. If your
fellowship is granted by a large funding agency like SSHRC, they need to feel
that what you’re doing is ‘important’; if you’re going to be in residence at a
humanities centre, which is where a lot of North American postdocs are, the
people there need to feel that you will be able to talk to the other fellows,
who will be doing very different things indeed. And if you’re trying Oxford or Cambridge,
your interviewers need to feel that you’re appropriate for the college you’re
applying to, which means you should be seen as able to talk to the other
fellows of the college without putting them to sleep—or falling asleep when
they try and talk to you; and being the UK, they’re probably also going to want
to feel that you will produce ‘output’
with ‘impact’. So take some time to look into all the details of the
fellowship, who the other fellows are if it’s an institute with longer-term
fellows, or a college with particular strengths; and think about how best you
can make yourself sound like you’d fit well—while still being you.
Obviously, if you’re doing this for a whole bunch of applications, it’s quite a
headache and it takes time—and you have to remember, and you have to make sure
to remind your referees also, what spin exactly you’re using for each different
application.
Ideally, your
proposal will be essentially genuine and you, with only some amount of
window-dressing; make sure you get advice from someone who knows your field,
and preferably someone who is very good at coaxing cash out of funding
agencies; only such a person will be able to judge the delicate question as to
when the proportion of bullshit to real stuff is too much or too little.
3. So where
are these things anyway?
All over the
place, and I don’t claim to provide a comprehensive list. Generally useful
sites that you should know: H-Net’s job
guide; jobs.ac.uk; the Oxford Gazette; and the Cambridge Reporter. (The Academic Jobs Wiki
is also a useful, if often depressing, resource; I’d recommend avoiding it as
much as possible.) All do also publish info on postdocs; Oxbridge postdocs
start getting advertised in August, and the Gazette and Reporter are published
weekly, so keep checking for updates. Postdocs are not in the advertisements
section of the Gazette; they’re under ‘appointments’. It’s not a bad idea,
additionally, to subscribe to the relevant H-Net
mailing lists for your field; they often post jobs outside North America
that are not listed on the H-Net job guide. If you do languages, you will also
want to look at the MLA job lists (I believe your department needs to subscribe
to this); and if you’re a Latinist, you might want to contact someone in
Classics to see if they can help you find resources (Classics departments do
occasionally hire medievalists). Note that I haven’t given any information about
postdocs outside North America and Europe, since these are the continents where
most of the research on medieval Europe is conducted; if you do something
interdisciplinary or having to do with non-European regions (for example,
European colonies in sixteenth-century; the crusades; Marco Polo), you might
well find opportunities in the relevant countries outside Europe and North
America. You might, in addition, want to look at Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa, as places where there are scholars active in studying European
history; this is particularly the case for Australia, where the University of
Sydney has a good Centre for
Medieval Studies. Furthermore, it might be useful to search outside what
you think of as your main field (e.g. medieval studies, history, a particular
language), and look at major departments in cognate fields; sometimes the
fellowships come in unlikely places (so, for example, economic historians can
find fellowships in economics departments, even in cases where those
departments have no one working on the middle ages; art historians might find
money in a design school; and don’t forget places like MIT and Caltech, both of
which have good humanities departments and lots of money).
I’m afraid that
while I do periodically update the site with information about postdocs that I
did not earlier know about, I do not have the time to check every link and all
the information about salaries and length of tenure and so on, so please do
bear in mind that what is given below is a guideline only. All salaries given
below were accurate at the time I first compiled this website (2008/9), and in
the respective local currency; these things do change, as do the urls for the
websites, so even if the links are dead, use google: the postdocs will probably
still be there. DEADLINES CHANGE! The dates here are from when I last checked,
but only as a general guideline; I do not have the time to update all of these
details regularly. So do check the websites well before the dates
I’ve given here. Some have online applications only; some have paper
applications only; some accept either. And once more, the application
procedures do change: use the stuff below as a general guide, not as gospel
truth. Note that the information below is only for long-term fellowships
of one year or more. There are, in addition, many short-term research
grants you can get for anything from a month to a year (many at major research
libraries in North America and elsewhere with prominent medieval collections,
such as the Beinecke
Library at Yale, which also occasionally has long-term fellowships, or the Newberry
Library in Chicago), some of which you will be able to find from the links
below; I have, however, made no attempt to give details on these in any
systematic fashion.
North America:
I know nothing
about US government funding (generally available only to US citizens), so I
have no info on that here; try the links on Hutcheon’s
site. There is also (at present, anyway) a list of postdoctoral fellowships
available, primarily but not only in North America, on Berkeley’s website.
For Canadians or
Canadian permanent residents, SSHRC offers postdoctoral
fellowships of up to two years, currently $38,000 per year with a research
allowance of up to $5,000. You do need to get letters from a ‘supervisor’ at
your host institution, as well as from the department chair there, and two
other referees. The deadline is currently mid-October; everything has to be
done online (this includes references: warn the more old-fashioned or Luddite
profs you’re going to ask well in advance). These may be held in Canada or
abroad; if you have a PhD from outside Canada, the SSHRC postdoc is tenable
only in Canada. You are eligible for three years after completing the PhD.
SSHRC has now
also introduced the Banting
Postdoctoral Fellowships programme; this gives you $70,000 per year for two
years, and you require your host institution to be fully committed to your
research programme. These will not normally be granted for tenure at the same
university where you completed your doctorate; Canadians as well as
non-Canadians may apply, within three years of completing the PhD, to start the
fellowship within four years of completing the PhD. Non-Canadians and Canadians
who completed their doctoral work outside Canada must hold their fellowships at
Canadian universities; Canadians who completed a doctorate at a Canadian
university may hold a fellowship abroad, though the number of fellowships to be
given for tenure outside Canada is to be restricted.
Four Canadian
universities offer Izaak Walton Memorial Killam Postdoctoral Fellowships. These
are currently worth $46,000 per year plus a research allowance of $4,000 to
$6,000; they are tenable for two years and must commence within two years of
completing a PhD, and offered in any discipline (sciences included). The
institutions are the University
of Alberta; UBC;
the University of Calgary;
and Dalhousie
University. At all of them, you do need to identify a faculty
‘supervisor’ beforehand. Deadlines vary between universities, but are generally
late November or December.
Also in Canada:
PIMS offers a Mellon postdoc,
tenable normally for one year; no local supervisor is required, and the
fellowship pays $35,000 per year. The deadline is currently the 1st
of March.
McGill offers a Mellon postdoc
in the humanities, tenable for one year, but normally renewable for a second;
you will need to find a sponsor in the humanities department you wish to work
in. This currently pays $45,000 per year, plus a $8,500 research allowance.
McGill also offers a Tomlinson postdoctoral fellowship in the Humanities, again
renewable for a second year; no sponsor is required, and the fellowship pays
$30,000 per year. For the Mellon, this year’s deadline was the 23rd
of November; for the Tomlinson, it was the 3rd of November. You are
generally required to teach one full course per year.
For any readers
of this page who did not do a PhD at the University of Toronto, the Jackman Humanities
Institute offers themed Mellon fellowships; they pay $50,000 per year for
two years, and you teach a course each term (and you get 24/7 access to one of
the best offices on campus!).
U of T’s School
of Graduate Studies offers some further advice on getting postdocs at U of T here.
In general, you
are eligible to apply for a Mellon fellowship, and other North American
postdocs, within two or three years of completing your PhD; you must
have the PhD completed (including defence) by the time you take up the postdoc.
In the USA:
The Society of Fellows in the
Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago offers four-year postdoctoral teaching fellowships. The
annual salary is currently $55,000. These are not research fellowships:
you will be expected to teach two courses each quarter in the university’s core
course programmes in the humanities
or social
sciences, or in their history
of civilisation core course sequence. You do not need a local sponsor or
supervisor, but you will need to demonstrate in your application an aptitude
for teaching these courses. Last year’s deadline was the 15th of
October. Harvard
College also offers teaching fellowships for one year, extendable for a
second year; these used to pay $49,000 per year, and the deadline is normally
between February and April.
The Institute for Research in the Humanities at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison offers a number of postdoctoral fellowships, including three to four
one-year Solmsen Postdoctoral
Fellowships specifically for scholars in Classics, Medieval and Renaissance
Studies; these currently provide you with $55,000 for the year, and you don’t
have to teach. The University of Southern California offers two-year
fellowships in their Provost’s
Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities that, as far as I can tell,
have no nationality or subject restrictions. They used to pay $50,000 a year,
with a research grant of $6,000; you teach three semester courses in two years.
The other main
opportunities are at humanities centres in major US universities, many funded
by the Mellon
foundation. None of these fellowships require a local sponsor; they
generally do require some teaching (and you will have to include some sort of
teaching portfolio or course outline in your application), but not more than
one course per term; they are invariably open to all humanities disciplines,
and the competition is thus very intense. What they are looking for (apart from
excellence in scholarship) is people who will be capable of interacting and
functioning well in an interdisciplinary setting, and contributing to a
stimulating climate of intellectual exchange across the borders dividing
differing scholarly communities (sorry, they do really talk like this). I was a
graduate fellow at the JHI in
Toronto, and from my own experience I can say that while being thrown into a
community of very bright scholars who know absolutely nothing about what you do
can be very enriching indeed, it can also be quite a challenge, as a
medievalist, trying to communicate about what you do (in my case, Jordanes
and—hold your breath—Fredegar!) to people who work on topics as diverse as
Brassaï, native Canadian literature, Rushdie—after all, even medievalists often
tune out when you start talking about Fredegar… If you have had little
interaction with scholars outside medieval studies (and one thing I cannot
recommend strongly enough is that you make sure you DO have such interactions
throughout your time in grad school), it can also be difficult to contribute
meaningfully to the discussions taking place in such settings, where you might
be the only person working on a pre-modern subject. You need to be able to
show, somehow, to the committee when you apply that you’ll be able to meet
these challenges.
Some of the
institutes that have humanities fellowships without themes: at Columbia,
it’s for three years, and currently gives you $62,000 per year plus an annual
$6,500 research allowance; you have to teach one course per semester the first
year, and one course per year thereafter. The deadline in 2016 was 3 October. Princeton’s fellowship
(perhaps not funded by Mellon; I’m not sure) gives you $84,500 (!) plus a
$5,000 research allowance every year, for three years; this year’s deadline 15
September. You teach a course every term. There are normally three or four
positions every year, at least one of which seems not to be themed, though the
others are. Harvard’s
humanities centre similarly has a fellowship (that pays less than
Princeton: only $65,000), which is tied to an annual theme. The deadline in
2016 1 December. Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute also offers fellowships,
though these are not specifically for recent graduates and are thus likely to
be even more competitive. Needless to say, these places get huge numbers of
applications (900 and above), and generally don’t offer more than two or three
fellowships in a year. But some have gone to medievalists in the past, so you
might get one too.
Many other
schools also have Mellon fellowships, but generally with changing annual
themes, and I have made no attempt to list all of them: google humanities
centre (or rather, center), or society of fellows, along with the name of the
university you’re interested in, and you should come up with something. Some
universities offering such fellowships (to my knowledge unrestricted as to
nationality, and all themed, but check: I’m not entirely certain about whether
all these have annual themes, and whether they are all indeed unrestricted): Cornell (where
there are both Mellons
and Society
Fellowships), Michigan,
Penn, Stanford, Wesleyan,
Wisconsin-Madison;
doubtless many others have these too. These are all in the range of $45,000 to
$60,000; deadlines vary, but are generally in the fall; they tend always to
have themes. For the private universities, there’s normally no restriction with
regard to nationality; many state schools also offer these kinds of fellowships,
but these are often only open to US citizens or residents. Linda
Hutcheon’s website is once more a good source of information, in addition
to the Berkeley
page already listed.
Europe
Since all I know
about is the UK and Germany, that’s basically all I’ve got; but here are some
suggestions for elsewhere in Europe:
– The European Research Council has a large number
of grants for scholars between two and twelve years of finishing their PhD,
which must be held at a host institution in Europe, but may be held by persons
of any nationality; information on these and how to apply (the procedure seems
to be very complex indeed) is available here;
as is the case with the Newton Fellowships (on which more below), you will need
to coordinate your application very closely with your host institution, so you
will have to do a lot of advance planning and make sure you have sufficiently
supportive contacts—but it sounds as if these things would be well worth it, as
they award lots of money for up to five years, and past projects they have
supported include work on subjects like Aragonese troubadors, the princely
classes of the late medieval Empire, Pauline exegesis, the formation of Islam,
and vernacular bible translations in the middle ages, so your topic, whatever
it is, would not, it would seem, be the main hurdle as long as you can show
that you are at the cutting-edge of your field;
– Also EU-funded
are the Marie
Curie actions, of which there are many kinds, including some that are
available for ‘third-country’ scholars, that is to say non-EU scholars. Like
anything to do with the EU, this seems to be a fiendishly complicated business,
but also typical of the EU is the apparent generosity: if you can figure out
how to work it (and I have not had the time to go into that), it’s probably
going to be a very good thing indeed for you;
– The European
University Institute near Florence tends to focus on modern matters, but
they do have people working on pre-modern history as well, and offer two-year
postdoctoral fellowships for people of any nationality who are within five
years of completing the doctoral degree, with a monthly stipend of €2,000 and
the possibility of an allowance for family and children;
– Perhaps the Central European University at Budapest might
have something, though their funds are somewhat limited (they do, however, have
a good medieval studies programme);
– The CNRS
in France does, or at least used to, offer a wide range of postdocs in various
fields, but your French will obviously have to be very good;
– If you know the
language, you should try universities and local equivalents to SSHRC in
whatever country you happen to be interested in: there is money around, if you
know how to look for it.
The German
Historical Institute has branches in London,
Moscow, Paris, Rome,
and Warsaw; these often have fixed-term
jobs for between two to six years that are primarily research posts, and pay
pretty well; you do normally need at least basic German, but if your research
concerns the target country and you are excellent in the language spoken there,
the German may not necessarily be much of a hurdle. The jobs in all cases will
be doing research either on the target country or on Germany, or on something
that involves both. All institutes have webpages in both German and the
language of the host country. Jobs are not open every year, so keep an
eye open on these websites; they are often open to people who have several
years of postdoctoral experience already, so these are not things you should
forget about after two years of postdoc experience in research or teaching. The
amount of emphasis on the middle ages varies across institutes; Paris and Rome
have traditionally been extremely strong on medieval research, and both those
institutes publish very prestigious journals with plenty of important medieval
content (Francia
and Quellen und Forschungen aus
Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken) and a number of important
monograph series, and the DHI Paris was the home of such heavyweight
medievalists as Martin Heinzelmann, Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand
Werner. Warsaw, relatively recently founded, is also strong on medieval
research, and all the other institutes also have strong publishing programmes.
In addition, you might want to look at the webpages of the institute in Washington; they often have information on
fellowships, though they themselves, logically enough, offer little of interest
to medievalists. The kinds of jobs and the length of their tenure, whether
there are citizenship requirements, and how frequently the jobs are advertised
vary, but there do often seem to be opportunities for people who are not EU
citizens.
Similar
institutes funded by other governments probably exist too, and you should try
and find what you can, but you will be best guided by scholars who are aware of
the situation in the countries you work on; I am only aware of the Institut français d’histoire en Allemagne (I am
grateful to Sébastien Rossignol for informing me about the postdoc
opportunities here), the British School at Rome
and the American Academy in Rome, all of
which do have jobs and fellowships for scholars at various stages in their
careers, though there might be some citizenship restrictions.
The Network of European Institutes for
Advanced Study has a fellowship
programme offering ten-month fellowships at one of the member institutes;
you are eligible for up to seven years after completing your doctoral degree to
be a junior fellow (for which you get €26,000); there are also more
generously funded senior fellowships. You may want to check out the websites of
the various individual member institutions too, for fellowships administered
directly by them, though as far as I know, they do not offer any fellowships
for junior scholars beyond the one mentioned here.
I have no idea
how the European Commission works and how easy it is to get money out of it—but
I do know that they seem to have oodles of cash for research of all kinds, so
maybe they have postdocs too, apart from the grants of the European Research
Council mentioned above. I do know that some of the Scandinavian and Dutch
universities especially have a fair amount of money, and often also websites in
English (universities elsewhere also have money, but in southern and eastern
Europe there seems—to an outsider like me—to be less money floating around,
though this is maybe just because webpages in English are not as common, and I
know less about those regions anyway because they lie outside my own fields).
If you know of a school that would be good for what you do, do take the
time to look it up, contact someone, find out if anything is possible for you
there. And keep an eye open for job postings in the relevant newspapers or
websites for the country you’re interested in, since there are always things
that come up with more-or-less independent funding for specific projects (for
instance, a postdoc on the prosopography of early medieval bishops of Limoges
was advertised a couple of years ago), which may not be too well advertised in
North America (or even in Europe). The H-Net
lists are very useful for this sort of thing, as there are country specific
lists for, among others, England, France, Germany, Portugal (and others), and
topic-specific lists on, for example, the Catholic Church, environmental
history, and warfare. Not all lists are equally active, but on the better ones,
you’ll get frequent posts for job and postdoc opportunities relevant to your
field and region that might not be that easy to find elsewhere. In addition, in
general, be aware of where the work most relevant or interesting to you is
produced, and look up those universities or contact the people there in your
field: there is often money for fellowships or jobs of some sort, even if it’s
not advertised in the most accessible places.
In the UK, funding is scarce for non-EU citizens
(if you are an EU citizen, therefore, you will have additional sources of
funding beyond what’s listed here; if you’re British of have recent affiliation
with a British institution, try the British Academy,
and the Leverhulme
Trust). (2016 update: everything non-Oxbridge stated here relating to the
UK is provisional in light of Brexit!) The main possibilities for non-Europeans
are the JRFs (Junior Research Fellowships; they also sometimes go by other
names) at the various Oxbridge colleges, and the Newton International
Fellowship. In addition, there are the rather meagre funds provided by the
Economic History Society (c. £15,000; for this one, you need a UK degree,
either the PhD or a prior degree), and the somewhat more generous stipend
offered by the Past and Present Society (£19,000), in both cases for one-year
fellowships. Both of these are administered by the Institute for Historical Research
in London, and you will be expected either to live in London or to live close
enough to be able to take part in the seminars at the institute; so, while
these fellowships these would certainly look good on your cv, the expense
involved in moving to London for just a year might make it not worth your
while: £15,000 is not a lot to live on in that very expensive city! The Warburg Institute
also sometimes has postdocs in its own fields; if you don’t know already what
those are, you won’t be eligible. Durham University announced an EU-funded JRF with
fourteen positions available in 2011, and will re-open for application again in
2016; scholars with prior postdoctoral experience are preferred, but
outstanding very recent PhDs may also apply. There seems to be no citizenship
requirement; it’s not clear whether this will be running in subsequent years or
not. A number of other UK universities, announced Vice-Chancellor’s of
Chancellor’s Fellowship programmes over the past few years; Sheffield
and Edinburgh
seem still to be running them, but so are many others for all I know, so keep
an eye open on jobs.ac.uk for anything that comes up. These are highly
competitive, open across all fields, and normally will require you to be
someone who can turn in an excellent REF submission and also acquire external
grant funding (more on this below).
The Oxbridge colleges
generally require you to start the fellowship within three to eight years
of starting your first graduate degree (normally closer to three than eight),
or of starting ‘research’: research here means what you do after your
coursework, so the compulsory one year of courses in North American PhD
programmes does not count. Be sure that you don’t just give them the dates of
when you started: you need to be certain that they know that you’ve taken one
or two years of courses in the four or five years you’ve been doing a PhD.
There is a wide range of variation across colleges, but you will normally only
be eligible if you’ve managed to stay within the five-year package that U of T
provides. Note that some of the colleges require you to have had some prior UK
degree, but this is by no means the case for all of them (not explicitly, at
any rate). All the fellowships are advertised in the Oxford Gazette (under appointments, not
advertisements) and the Cambridge
Reporter (and during August and early September, when the Reporter ceases
publication, the Cambridge fellowships are advertised here), and
normally also at jobs.ac.uk. For Oxford,
you should also look at TORCH,
which doesn’t quite seem to have got fully organised yet (in 2016), but might
do so very quickly. Do pay attention to the wording of the advert: many
colleges offer both stipendiary and non-stipendiary fellowships, and you don’t
want the latter! Most colleges offer only one every year, but some offer two or
three; some colleges specify fields (but not very exactly: it will be Modern
Languages, or History, or Philosophy, but rarely more precise than that), while
others are completely open to all fields; many are restricted to the humanities
or the sciences, but do not narrow it down beyond that. Do remember that
‘modern’ languages includes medieval; and ‘modern’ history also generally (but
not invariably) includes medieval. There are quite a few fellowships offered
through these colleges collectively: I don’t know how the current turmoil will
hit them, but for fellowships starting in 2009, there were between twenty-five
and thirty in humanities subjects across the various colleges. Needless to say,
you will probably not be eligible for all of them, because of your past
education, the number of years you’ve spent in it, and your specific subject;
but chances are that if you’ve finished within five years, you should be able
to find at least ten to fifteen that you could apply for.
The stipends vary
from the very good ones (£25,000 per year plus a research allowance plus either
a housing allowance, or free accommodation and food), to the somewhat mean ones
(£16,000 per year: not a lot in Oxford); the length is, in almost all cases,
three years, though some of them are for four (for example, Trinity at
Cambridge, St John’s and Merton at Oxford), and All Souls is an astounding
five. At some of the colleges, you are expected to teach, at others you are
permitted to; these are, however, all quite strictly research fellowships,
and the teaching is never supposed to be more than six hours of tutorials per
week (for which you are generally paid separately, in addition to the stipend
for the fellowship itself). And yes, if you teach, you will have to do Oxbridge
tutorials, one on one with a student for an hour, or you and just two or three
of them; you will generally not be expected to teach larger classes or give
lectures, though you may get the opportunity to do so; you may also be able to
participate in graduate teaching, including possibly supervising theses at the
MA (or MPhil or MSt) level. The deadlines are generally in the fall, mainly
September and October, but some are a good deal later; Trinity Cambridge had a
deadline in March. Note that many of these fellowships do not require
you already to have completed your PhD: you can finish it in your first year
there (but they do need to feel certain that you will finish it: these are not
supposed to be doctoral scholarships).
These are all,
obviously, heavily competitive, and they seem to be made for insiders: as I
said already, ninety per cent of them (possibly more) go to people with an
Oxbridge background—but if you have no such past, don’t lose hope: you might be
one of the ten per cent! Things also do seem to be changing a little bit now,
and certainly, looking at the profiles of current fellows and (equally
important), current faculty (who are, in the UK, called staff), it seems to be
somewhat less of a closed shop than it once was. The application processes vary
widely between colleges: one might ask you for a 1,000-word statement of your
past research and another statement of similar length of your proposed
research; another might ask for a 1,500-word statement of current and proposed
research (but note: not past research!); yet another will ask for 1300 words on
past, present, and proposed research. Some will allow you to send a full cv,
whereas others will only ask for a list of publications; some will have space
for awards and scholarships, and others might not. So you’ll have to have a
bunch of short pieces on past, present and future research that you can cut and
paste and expand and contract; make sure you do a careful job with the cutting
and pasting, because the last thing you want is for it to look obvious. Some of
the applications are online, others are not; some ask for two referees, others
for three. None ask for a teaching portfolio. The stages of the application
process also vary: some ask for a writing sample straight away, and a second
one when you make the shortlist, and then you get called for an interview;
others have no interviews, and only ask for a writing sample in the second
stage; and there are further variations of this sort. It’s all very irritating,
because there are quite a few you might be able to apply for, and each one
needs to be tweaked, often quite a lot. You probably do need to familiarise
yourself somewhat with the colleges, their profiles, and how they function
(especially if you get to the interview stage); but ultimately, these things
are really a lottery: even if you think you’re a perfect fit for a particular
college, you might just not be what they want. And then you might end up
getting a fellowship at a college where you thought there was no fit, but you
applied anyway since you were submitting so many. Do make sure that your
referees are also aware of the differences between the applications:
reference letters are where information that the application does not allow you
to mention can be provided; also don’t hesitate to send a cover letter if the
application is not online and it seems appropriate.
If you are
applying for an Oxbridge JRF (or any other postdoc, or a job, in the UK), it
might be useful for you to bear in mind some important distinctions between the
British system and North America. (The following comments have to do with the
length and nature of higher education, not funding structures and the pressures
involved when working there: those issues will probably affect you less as a
postdoc, though you should make yourself aware of them, particularly if you are
hoping to work in the UK after the postdoc. Follow this link
for a good if somewhat scary article on how things work, this
one for more historical context and an analysis of how ‘management’ is
taking over, and then google Research Assessment Exercise (now obsolete) and
Research Excellence Framework (the new system) to get a sense of what the
atmosphere has been for some years; see also the comments on Hutcheon’s pages here
and here,
and the amusing rants on Simon Blackburn’s page here. See further, for
more detail and shocks, Stefan Collini’s pieces on TEF,
privatisation,
and the Browne
report.) As noted above, these fellowships normally expect you to have
spent not more than three to four years on your PhD; given that on this side of
the pond, six years is quite normal, this might seem absurdly unrealistic, but
in fact British PhDs do tend to be completed in about three years—four years
would not be terribly uncommon, but longer than that would certainly be greeted
with more than just raised eyebrows. British universities still offer—and in
fact require—a rather more specialised, and faster, education than their North
American counterparts: humanities undergraduate degrees are typically three
years, not four (except for modern language courses, which normally require, or
at least allow, a year abroad); this is followed by a one-year masters degree,
comprising courses and a thesis of some sort; and then comes the PhD, which is
expected to be completed in three years, and rarely formally requires courses,
or a ‘major field’ or ‘comprehensive’ or ‘general’ examination or any such
thing. The three years of the PhD are just ‘research’: what you do in North
America after coursework, language requirements (and possibly also the exam).
Thus the whole process from freshman to Dr takes seven to eight years—and
people do complete it in this amount of time (not invariably, but it is by no
means unusual).
This is not
because the Brits are more brilliant than we are; it’s because they get a much
more focused (some might say narrow) education. At U of T, an undergraduate
major requires 10 full courses in the major subject, out of a total of 20 full
courses for the degree; in addition to the major two minors are required, or
one can do two full majors; various courses not necessarily related to the
major are also required, for breadth. This is pretty standard out here; in the
UK, it’s different. For example, I did a major (single honours, as they called
it) in German; I took a total of 12 course units (as they were called), of
which only two were outside the German department—and I was able to take those
two because I started off reading for a joint honours degree in History and
German. For single-honours German, I’d have been restricted to 1.5 course units
outside the department. As you see, that’s a lot more focus on one subject.
Things are changing a bit, but slowly, and the percentage of courses taken in
the major subject remains far higher than over here. Furthermore, in most
cases, if you’re doing a modern language degree, or classics, you will still be
expected to have done the modern language or Latin for your A-levels
(high-school); you cannot normally land up at university, take courses for a
year and a half, and then declare your major in German, having had no German at
all beforehand. (This is, however, also changing at many institutions—but you
still have to know your major before you get there, even though you can now
start a degree in German vel sim.
with no prior knowledge of the language.)
Thus, when you
get to starting the doctoral degree, you’ve normally (though not invariably)
done a good deal more specialised stuff in your field than your counterpart in
North America. This is not always a good thing: British historians are often
sadly lacking in Latin, and generally don’t have quite the opportunities (or
obligations) to learn medieval vernaculars (or modern languages), and
palaeography and diplomatics and so on, as we do here (but we’re unusual in
North America too—and proudly so!); and lacking language requirements, there is
an increasing and alarming trend towards anglolexia. The other reason why PhDs
go faster over there is because generally, grad students don’t teach, or if
they do, they don’t teach a lot—certainly not 240 hours a year. They also do
less time in RAships than you would over here. The combination of more
specialised undergrad education, only one year of coursework (in the MA), and
the lack of formal language requirements or a qualifying exam of any sort,
coupled with the freedom from so much teaching, means that they can naturally
finish faster over there. Hence the strictness of the JRFs with regard to time
spent in a graduate programme or research: for someone in that system to
have spent six years on the PhD (not including the MA) would really make them
look like slackers.
Now, committees
do vaguely know that we do things differently over here, so they won’t
necessarily reject you automatically because they see how many years ago you
first registered in a PhD programme. But you do need to remind them, in
a cover letter or your statement of what you’ve been doing (or, if these are
not options because of the format of application, through your referee’s
letters), and why it is that you’ve spent so long: required courses, teaching,
RAships… This is another reason why you need to tailor the applications
individually, to make sure that they do know where you’re coming from; and why
you need to make sure your referees are aware of what they need to highlight
(especially if none of them have any experience of the British system: it’s
part of the reference letter’s job to state things that candidate, for one
reason or another, can’t quite convey, and that would include reminding
committees why all those years you’ve taken do not make you a less able
researcher than someone from Cambridge who finished in three years). But a word
of caution: you’re only telling them about your teaching experience so that
they know why you took so long; you’re not trying to demonstrate to them that
you are a brilliant and flexible teacher with a range extending from early
medieval history to Britain between the wars to basic Latin to ancient China:
these are research fellowships, and
they don’t really care so much about the teaching experience (this sort of
stuff is, however, very important for the Mellon postdocs, and of course for
all jobs, including in the UK). What they want to know is why you took so long
to do your research, how good your research is, and that you will, if given the
space of three years without other responsibilities, produce good stuff within
that period.
The Newton International Fellowship
(which, according to what google turns up, has a success rate of around six per
cent including all fields—probably much lower for humanities applicants)
is funded by the British Academy, but also (unfortunately) by the Royal Society
and the Royal Society of Engineers. It’s only for people from outside the UK,
and without a UK PhD. There are fifty of these things altogether, every year;
guess how many go to the humanities… If you get it, you get £24,000 per year
for two years, a moving allowance of £2,000; a research grant of £8,000 per
year; and a ten-year ‘follow-up funding package’ of £6,000 per year after you
finish. That’s a lot of money they’re throwing at you: and they really make you
work to prove you’re worth it! It’s a long and fiendishly complicated
application procedure: you need six referees (your current supervisor and head
of department; your sponsor and prospective head of department at the
institution where you’ll be a postdoc; two independent referees unconnected
with your current or prospective institution), and everything has to be done
online—and there’s a lot to do. And you will also need to go through some kind of
bureaucratic hassle with your prospective institution, getting them to approve
your funding application (and thus you’ll have to figure out whether your
application is fec or non-fec…). One of the things you need to state in your
application is how your work will be of benefit both to your home country and
to the UK: this is where you need to be a really creative sort of medievalist
(and don’t ask me for advice; I didn’t get it, so clearly, what I do is not
beneficial in any way).
In addition to
Oxbridge and the Newton, you will find—in the Oxford Gazette, the Cambridge
Reporter, but even more likely at jobs.ac.uk—other
postdoc opportunities of various sorts (and plenty of fixed-term jobs in
various medieval fields), generally as a part of some particular research
project. As you can imagine, there are plenty of things going on that relate
specifically to medieval England, and if you have the right sort of background,
you could have a very good chance: Toronto does have an excellent reputation in
the UK for all things medieval and English. So keep your eyes skinned, and be
ready to react fast: the timeline is often very short indeed. (2016 update:
once again, with the post-Brexit unleashing of a surprisingly vicious level of
xenophobia, getting anything in the UK that is not hugely well-endowed might be
tricky if not impossible—but who knows what will happen there in the next few
years?)
Germany still manages to be a country with lots
of money for humanities scholarship, and for foreigners—and you don’t always
have to know German particularly well, though of course having at least a basic
knowledge of it will certainly help. The first place to look is the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher
Akademischer Austausch Dienst: DAAD), which itself offers a number of
fellowships for postdocs (and scholars at various other levels), ranging from
stipends for a few months to two years; in addition, they provide information
on and sometimes administer fellowships provided by other funding agencies in
Germany, including the many offered by the DFG: the German
Research Foundation, or more properly the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (I have not provided a list of what you can find
through the DAAD pages, because the results of your search will vary depending
on, among other things, country of origin and how recently you graduated). The search
is made easy by the fact that you can key in your field, date of graduation,
and country of origin, and the things you’re eligible for will come up; but
it’s not infallible, so you might want to have a look at the complete list as
well. All pages are, of course, available in English as well as German. In
general, you will be eligible to apply within two to four years of the PhD; the
fellowships tend to pay pretty well, often covering moving expenses, health
insurance, fees for language courses, and so on. Among the best of the
fellowships (I’m not considering some that expect a commitment to seek a job in
Germany after the fellowship) are probably those offered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation:
they have two levels of fellowships for junior scholars, one for scholars within
four years of completing a PhD, and the other for scholars who are between
four and twelve years of getting their doctorate. These are all for
international scholars, across all fields; the former is tenable for up to two
years, and the latter for up to eighteen months. You get paid €2,250 per month,
plus a research allowance, moving expenses for yourself and your family,
language courses for your spouse, and health insurance. For these fellowships,
you do need to know German. There is no application deadline; you should
hear from them within six months of applying. You will need a local
sponsor. About 600 of these fellowships are offered every year, across all
fields—so the competition will be intense, but 600 is still quite a lot, and
plenty do go to humanists. If you feel that you’re a real hotshot and you’ve
got a book out, maybe another one in press, and it’s less than six years after
you’ve finished your PhD, you can apply for the Sofja
Kovalevskaja Prize; you get up to €1,650,000 (no, I did not get the number
of zeros wrong!) over five years to do your research and head a research group.
Needless to say, even though about ten of these are offered every year, it
seems most likely that humanists will not get any… If you have held a Humboldt
or a DAAD fellowship, in addition to what you get during tenure, you’re
generally eligible for a number of fellowships and awards as a former member of
their ‘family’; these are, like the Newton, good things to have for the longer
term. Apart from the ones mentioned here, the Humboldt does have other
fellowships as well, and DAAD gives listings of many possible opportunities: DO
look over the Humboldt, DFG and the DAAD pages carefully, as I haven’t listed
all the opportunities here, and there are many things that are specific to
fields and countries of origin which you might be eligible for.
But DAAD and
Humboldt are not the only places: many German universities have their own
money, and are at present actively seeking international researchers. If you
are on the H-German or H-Germanistik or H-Soz. u. Kult. mailing lists,
you’ll receive the adverts; if your German is good enough, look up Die Zeit regularly (the relevant jobs are
normally sent out in the mailing lists I’ve mentioned). German universities are
in a strange state right now, trying rapidly to become as American as possible,
but not entirely sure how to do it; you might find it a bit hard to figure out
how they work, even if your German is excellent, but don’t be too taken aback:
they’re finding it pretty hard to figure out how they work too! Alas, the
downside of this is that the Germans too are beginning to go the way of Britain
and/or America (they like to think they are learning from what it pleases them
to call the ‘Angelsächsischen Länder’); if you hear the words ‘Output mit
Impakt’, don’t be too surprised… Often, the money for postdocs (especially
international ones) does not come from traditional academic departments, but
rather from their new ‘graduate schools’ (which are nothing at all like what
you are familiar with from North America), or ‘Exzellenzinitive’, or
‘Exzellenzcluster’ (and no, I don’t really know how they pronounce ‘cluster’,
but I expect like Germans trying to speak American). These are often
interdisciplinary programmes gathering together faculty from various different
departments under one broad rubric, which is often rather like a theme for a
North American humanities centre or Mellon postdoc. Themes might be ‘human
development in landscapes’, or ‘religion and politics in pre-modern and modern
culture’, or ‘languages of emotion’, or ‘cultural bases of integration’ (just some
real examples I have seen myself). You will have to give them a proposal of
some sort that will fit into one of these themes; there are often sub-groups
with more specific themes, into which you might fit quite well. Like the
DAAD/Humboldt fellowships, you will need a local sponsor or referee or at least
someone who can help you figure out what’s going on. All of this might make
Germany seem like a very dicey option indeed, and perhaps it is; but do
remember: they have money, and they want foreigners. (Yes, I know it sounds
weird to say that Germans want foreigners, but at present, in the universities,
they do, or at least that’s what they say!) In some cases, you may find that
there are less restricted postdoc opportunities, being offered simply for excellent
scholarship in a particular discipline, without specifically requiring you to
fit yourself into a particular cluster; but it won’t harm you to know how
things are structured at that university, and around that discipline, and how
you can fit into whatever their current research priorities are. Among the
better-endowed universities for humanities fields are the Free University in
Berlin, and the universities of Cologne, Freiburg, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Marburg
and Munich; but many others also have plenty of money: take some time to look
around if you know of work related to your field coming out of any particular
place, or a scholar whose work you know and respect. Almost all universities
now have websites in English; if you’re German isn’t too good, you can still
find the info, and get working on the German if you’ve found just the place
where you want to be. It’s all, of course, a rather different sort of way of
going about things from what you will be used to from your experience of the
‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries, but if you do have some familiarity with the country
and its universities, you might be able to work it out; it’s certainly worth a
shot if you’re interested in being in Germany— Germany remains an excellent
place for medieval scholarship, which is still often better funded there than
in much of the English-speaking world, and do remember that German universities
are still great places to study not just medieval Germany, but medieval Europe
generally (including, but not restricted to, the fields of Latin; palaeography;
art history; law; the medieval Church; and institutional history); and many
universities and towns have excellent archival deposits of medieval material,
often in Latin (the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
and the Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg are just two such institutions with plenty to offer people not
working on Germany)
* * *
And so begins the
journey into the ‘real world’; grad school was stressful, sure, but once you
hit the job market, you really appreciate how wonderful it was to have been a
student! One last thing: in my final year of grad school, I applied for
twenty-six and got one postdoc; and while it was great to have got that one, I
obviously got rejected by twenty-five. If you want to stand much of a chance,
you probably will have to apply to a lot of places, and that means that
you will also be rejected by a lot of places; don’t apply for more postdocs
than the number of rejections you think you can take without losing confidence
in yourself. Don’t take the rejection letters personally, but also don’t go
through this process unless you have a thick enough skin to handle it (to be
ambitious, you also need to be quite tough); and don’t give up after the first
round: try again the next year, learning from your first experiences. You’ve
survived grad school; you’ve published some good work; your teachers think
you’re good: so believe in yourself, and take the plunge. You are good
enough (and if they can’t appreciate it, screw them!). Remember two things:
you’re a good scholar, which is the important bit—all you need to do now is
master the marketing and get a bit lucky; and, one of the most important things
you learnt in your university career: alcohol can have its uses (but don’t
overdo it)…
Good luck!