Graduate Student Perspective: Structural Challenges to the History PhD

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Overwhelmed graduate student

By Sam Hossack

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the fourth in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

During the data collection phase of the Task Force on the Future of the History PhD, we spoke with graduate students in History programs across the country, including formal meetings with the Graduate Students’ Committee of the CHA, informal one-on-one meetings, and anonymous surveys. Over the course of these discussions, a common sentiment emerged: a genuine passion for history.

Graduate students care passionately about historical knowledge and methods — a passion shared by their faculty colleagues. Students believe in the potential of history to contribute to our communities. Those who pursue the PhD do so because they want to continue working in the discipline and contribute to historical knowledge. Their passion persists, despite multidimensional uncertainty and a lack of structural supports within PhD programs that inhibit student pursuits. Graduate students explained that they often feel unable to concentrate on their research due to the many demands on their time, and that they frequently reach the limit of both their mental and physical capacities.

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The Academic Job Market: Tenure-Track Assistant Professors in History in Canada

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By Will Langford

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the third in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

Many – if not almost all – fledging historians pursue a PhD degree with the intention of becoming a university professor. They do so well-aware of the word on the street: the academic job market offers few jobs for historians. The American Historical Association has substantiated the bleak common sense by reporting on academic hiring in the US and describing where historians actually work. I pursued similar research as a member of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada. In this blog post, I review what I learned about the employment situation by looking at the sought-after job category, the tenure-track assistant professor in History.

Job Search on the website universityaffairs.ca

Search jobs, https://www.universityaffairs.ca/search-job/

87 tenure-track assistant professors began work in History departments (or equivalent departments) at Canadian universities in 2016-17 to 2021-22. Teaching-stream professors were not considered in the count. The Task Force report contains a table listing the number of hirings by university. Below, a companion table displays where new tenure-track assistant professors earned their PhD degrees.

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Time to Completion of History PhDs in Canada

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By Will Langford

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the second in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

How long does it take to complete a History PhD? As a member of the CHA Task Force on the Future of History PhD in Canada, I conducted research to find out. The work built on a data set of the 562 History dissertations completed in Canada between September 2016 and August 2022.

To measure “time to completion,” I made several choices. In my view, the work of a PhD is done when a defended dissertation is submitted to a university’s online thesis repository. I wasn’t interested in how long students went on to wait to graduate. Therefore, a completion date for each dissertation was determined based on the repository submission metadata.

Figuring out when each PhD graduate began their program was not as simple. I initially contacted some graduate chairs and assistants, but there were privacy concerns in some provinces about revealing information about PhD students. Seeking another avenue, I realized that many recent graduates self-reported their PhD program start dates, either on LinkedIn or through curriculum vitae posted to sites like academia.edu. It didn’t even matter if the cv was an internet artifact from a past academic life. As long as graduates somewhere identified when they began their PhD studies, I was laughing. With end dates and many start dates in hand, I determined 355 case-specific completion times. I rounded each completion time to the nearest month.

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Recent History PhDs in Canada, by the Numbers

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By Will Langford

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the first in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

There are many facts and figures in the newly released report of the Canadian Historical Association’s Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada. As a group, the authors – Catherine Carstairs, Sam Hossack, Tina Loo, Christine O’Bonsawin, Martin Paquet, John Walsh, and myself – approached our work as a research project. We were aided by research assistant Danielle Mahon. We conducted surveys, held consultations, hosted workshops, scoured PhD program requirements, studied collective agreements, tabulated tuition fees, reviewed faculty information, drew on government statistics, and more. We aimed to describe and analyze many issues related to History PhD programs.

One of my data sets focused on completed dissertations. While the Task Force acknowledged that some historians are trained in PhD programs beyond the discipline proper, there are 24 History PhD programs in Canada involving 26 History departments. Students graduating from each department must submit their dissertation to their university’s online thesis repositories. Consulting the repositories, I counted 562 History dissertations completed between September 2016 and August 2022.

History Dissertations in Canada by Academic Year

History Dissertations in Canada by Academic Year

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Storms of a Century: Fiona (2022) & Five (1923)

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Photo of Southwest Bridge, Lot 16, after 1923 storm, from Annual Report of the Department of Public Works of the Province of PEI, 1924, overlain by still from video by @savage_sultin of unidentified bridge after 2022 storm.

Alan MacEachern

Rarely have I wanted so much to be on Prince Edward Island; never have I been so glad not to be there. It’s been hard to watch from a distance the disaster of Hurricane Fiona as it has unrolled slowly, then suddenly, then slowly again. Meteorologists warned days in advance that at landfall it would likely have the lowest recorded barometric pressure in Canadian history. (It did.) News sites began posting the requisite photos of empty grocery store shelves. Folks hauled out their emergency vocabularies: “batten hatches,” “hunker down.” And then, beginning in the early morning of 24 September, word of the storm’s arrival came, in the form of photos and videos on social media. Dark downpours, flooded streets. By daylight, there were scenes of washed-out roads, the twisted wreckage of buildings, and so many, many, many downed trees. It would be another day before attention began to be paid to the lost dunes on the Island’s North Shore beaches; another day still before satellite imagery from the Canadian Space Agency exposed the scale of widespread coastal erosion. And for many people, the disaster is still far from over: their power is still out, the trees still dead, broken, and in the way, and the roofs, cottages, and barns still needing repair or replacement. In a week, Islanders went from stockpiling storm chips to throwing out freezer food.

Whether to better understand the present or to distract myself from it, at the height of Fiona I researched a hurricane from PEI’s past.[1] Continue reading →

Epidemic at 30,000 feet: Historical Detachment during a Pandemic

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A smiling girl stands on a path, wearing a long white dress. She has one foot in a cast and is using crutches.

Oral History Participant Stephanie Stirling recovers from her post-polio syndrome related foot surgery in 1956. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Stirling.

Tyler Britz

For the past 2 years, I have been living through a pandemic, while researching a historical epidemic. In mid-2020, I had just finished up my third year of undergraduate studies at Wilfrid Laurier University when Dr. Tarah Brookfield recruited me into an undergraduate research project. The idea was to interview the generation that experienced the last major outbreak of polio and compare their experiences to COVID, as they would belong to the highest at-risk population of both diseases. With that goal, myself and three classmates (Lillia Dockree, Delores Maas, and Steve Parr) collected oral histories from current or former residents of our community of Brantford, Ontario, and the surrounding Brant County. We then turned the research into a digital exhibit for the Wilfrid Laurier Archives. I now work as an RA to continue our research for an academic article.

Our work so far has resulted in a detailed local history of polio. Brantford, like most Canadian towns and surrounding rural communities, faced almost annual outbreaks of polio in late summer/early fall. It caused mild to severe illness, death, and disability, mainly in children or young adults. Beginning with the 1910 outbreak, local, provincial, national, and international cases of polio received considerable media coverage in the Brantford Expositor. After Salk’s 1955 vaccine, polio waned as a threat until a 1978 outbreak, caused by anti-vaccine sentiment and slipping uptake in vaccine boosters, caused panic when cases were discovered in nearby Oxford County. Our research focuses on the evolving public health policy, medical treatments, and vaccine rhetoric, as well as the personal experiences of those who lived through or contracted polio, particularly as children. Continue reading →

The death of the longest-reigning monarch of “Canada”

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Crown, Kurt Kaiser/Wikimedia Commons.

Colin Coates

Early September saw the death of the European monarch who had reigned the longest over the territory some call Canada. The death was not unexpected. In some quarters, it might even have been welcomed. But it took some time for the news to reach Canada. The last ships had left months earlier on their Atlantic crossing. When they arrived in September and October 1715 with their missives from the court, issued in the name of Louis XIV, no one in Canada knew that the king had died. Continue reading →

Scaling Down History: A Hobby

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Sean Campbell

When I was a kid, my family would sometimes visit the model train exhibit at our local tourist office in North Bay, Ontario. When I stepped into the four train boxcars, welded together and crafted into four distinct rooms, it felt like shifting into a different world.

But this large layout spread over four boxcars made me feel omnipresent, like I was seeing into the vastness of the world. Each craggy rock. Each waterfall. Each small town. Brought to a scale that even a child feels like a giant. I marveled at what was in front of me. It was beautiful in the expanse it covered in something a little over 1000 ft².

A single-storey wooden building with a large sign that reads "Gift Shop - Dionne Quints Museum - Model Rail Exhibit - Welcome Bienvenue - Tourist Information - North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce."

Source: waymarking.com

I loved that something so small can give such power to the imagination, and inspire such wider curiosity. I wanted to build something like that, to have as my own in my home growing up. Continue reading →

Marking the 100th Anniversary of the Victoria Chinese Students’ Strike

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First Graduate Class of the Victoria Chinese Public School, 1915. BC Archives, D-08821.

Timothy J. Stanley

On September 5, 2022, over 600 people in Victoria, BC, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Chinese Students Strike. Participants included a Chinese Canadian veteran of the Second World War, the Police Chief who helpfully stopped traffic, two BC Government ministers–one of whom, the Attorney General, read the Premier of British Columbia’s message of support–the mayor of Victoria who condemned the racism of past and present, and the President of the Victoria Chamber of Commerce who made a moving apology for its role in school segregation. The event concluded with the Chair of the Victoria School Board reading aloud the Board’s formal apology to the Chinese community and presenting a commemorative plaque to the President of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the umbrella organization of Victoria’s Chinese community. This antiracist solidarity begins 100 years earlier.

On September 5, 1922, the principals of Victoria’s elementary schools began calling Chinese students out of their classes, lining them up, and marching them down the road. Continue reading →

Carving out a Collective Identity

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Henry Jacob

When artists exist outside of the canon, their names sometimes remain unknown. However, even if their personal identities fade, they may create objects that encourage future generations to better understand the time in which they lived. Occasionally, their artwork can also empower later viewers to reflect upon the collective identity of their own era.

The object of this essay compels me to consider not only the past and present violence we commit against the earth in the pursuit of luxury, but also how that environment responds to our devastating desires. In other words, this relic reminds me that a sense of self — to borrow the phrase from environmental historian, Linda Nash — is enmeshed within ‘inescapable ecologies’ that bind human and nonhuman actors. Moreover, current formulations of identity rely upon our acknowledging that we have harmed the environment; this process of reflection can begin with an examination of historical artifacts. Continue reading →