Indeed.
If you'll pardon me personalizing, I get asked fairly often why my academic career seems stalled despite a prestigious book contract and public presence and one of my first answers is more than half of departments are uninterested in ever hiring a military historian of any description.
If you'll pardon me personalizing, I get asked fairly often why my academic career seems stalled despite a prestigious book contract and public presence and one of my first answers is more than half of departments are uninterested in ever hiring a military historian of any description.
Reposted from
Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li
this is an elite thing, but i also just see it among my lib friends--the feeling that even knowing stuff about how modern militaries operate is a bit distasteful, impure, sus--"why are you so interested in all that military stuff? isn't that a conservative thing?"
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I am currently in a department where those courses are taught entirely by adjuncts, because there is no interest in dedicating a tenure line to them.
But the result is military history runs very hot-and-cold and in the elite privates it is *ice* cold.
Of course, they have the money. But 'ick, military history.'
No—they meant militias and missiles.
We did very well recruiting those students.
To radically oversimplify things.
Just poli-sci, really, a field that performs less well in isolation like that.
But the chances in the 'if' dice roll haven't changed in decades.
I can report that we don’t have an elite-uni bias. Our last couple of hires were UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz PhDs who beat out Ivy-Leaguers. But we’re a small department.
It is very hard to get considered for a UK post (and harder every year, I'm told) and even harder in the EU.
It's one reason I think the comparativists are much more interesting and useful than the Americanists: they're much more multi-disciplinary.
(poli-sci major, though not US)
Pm me, I've got a recommendation
Military History, Economic Archeology also.
Any history. That might be Marx.