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Religious Studies Beyond the Discipline

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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.

Purchasing chapters for this book: only one chapter within one of the three sections needs to be purchased for that entire section to be accessed.

Published: Oct 29, 2024

Book Contributors

Series


Section Chapter Authors
Prelims
Acknowledgements Russell McCutcheon
Foreword Raj Balkaran
Preface Russell McCutcheon
Introduction
Introduction Russell McCutcheon
Context
1. “The University Absolutely Had Nothing in Place…”: Life After Grad School with Bradley Sommer Jacob Barrett, Erica Bennett, Bradley J. 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, Pamela K. Gilbert
3. “What I’m Doing is Pivoting My Career…”: Life After Grad School with Jared Powell Jacob Barrett, Erica Bennett, Jared Powell
4. “Be Thoughtful About What Skills You’re Developing…”: Life After Grad School with Shannon Trosper Schorey Jacob Barrett, Erica Bennett, Shannon Schorey
Manifesto
5. A Manifesto on Earning and Awarding a Ph.D. Andrew Ali Aghapour, Shannon Schorey, Thomas Whitley, Vaia Touna, Russell McCutcheon
Responses
6. The Future of an Illusion Barbara R. Ambros, 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
Afterword Emily Crews
End Matter
Appendix 1: Tracking Doctoral Graduates in the Study of Religion Russell McCutcheon
Appendix 2: SBL/AAR Position Advertisements, 2001-2019 Russell McCutcheon
Resources Russell McCutcheon
Index Russell McCutcheon

Reviews

This landmark publication needs to be read—and read widely. Religious Studies Beyond the Discipline is more than a manifesto: it sparks a conversation, a crucial conversation, that we’d be wise to collectively engage, advance, enrich and put into action. Our very survival as a discipline depends upon it.
From the Foreword by Raj Balkaran