Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author ofMP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; mail by cruise missile; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org .
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From: http://sterneworks.org/Academe/
These pages are designed with the critical communication studies scholar in mind. They have an American bias since there are more resources online for Americans and since I started this page while living in the U.S., though much here also applies to Canadians. Of course others are welcome to it if they find it useful. Since communication(s) is a field and not a discipline, there isn’t a central publication or conference where to people go look for jobs. Our friends in lit have the MLA job list. Our friends in Philosophy have the brilliantly named “Jobs for Philosophers.” We have, well, a bunch of stuff. More than likely, anybody serious about hiring someone will have their ad appear in more than one place, but in my experience there’s no one place you can go to make sure all your bases are covered.
I offer these resources in the hope that people might take a gander at what’s out there before they need them. Originally, this page was derived from the resources that I used on my own first job search out of graduate school (in 1998 — it’s changed a lot since then), and is updated once a year. In the years since, I have gradually added material on a wide range of career issues facing academics. More materials will come as I have time and motivation.
Suggestions for additional links or topics are always welcome. This page was last updated in August 2014 and links constantly change. Feel free to contact me (jonathan [at] sterneworks [dot] org) if you have suggestions.
FREE PROFESSIONALIZATION RESOURCES
How to Get a PhD in the Age of Social Media
Great post by Christian Sandvig: “your more senior professors probably didn’t exchange information on job wikis, struggle with Homeland Security restrictions, and haven’t installed Typinator, so they’re less likely to give you advice about these things.”
How To Prep for Graduate School if You’re Poor
This is an amazing project by Karra Shimabukuro. A lot is not humanities specific but it’s worth reading whether you’re poor or not. Social class is something academic rarely talk about, but all the demands to “act professional” are demands about class behaviour. A lot of our expectations about proper academic behaviour behind the scenes are also tied to class (when do you ask for resources, how do you ask for them?). If you’re poor, this is great advice. If you’re a middle class Jewish kid from the suburbs (and a prof’s kid to boot) like me, this is also a manual on how to be a good ally and not expect all your students come from bourgeois backgrounds. PS — the original google doc is here.
A Critical Comm Studies Job Search Timeline
Get your life together with this schedule.
From Grad Student to Prof
You found a job, now what?
The Two Body Problem
What every academic couple should know before they go on the market together. See also this excellent Stanford report.
Blogging 101 for Academics
Want to start a blog? Wonder how it will relate to your career? Read this.
Advice on Publishing Your First Book
Links to a couple blogs with good advice for first-time academic book authors. I’ll add my $.02 at a later date.
Defusing the Fear: Publishing A Book Based on a Non-Embargoed Dissertation by Audrey Truschke
There is a lot of talk of embargoing dissertations because of fears about academic presses refusing to publish an open access dissertation. This article examines the evidence and reveals those fears to be unfounded. Except for University of Toronto Press, which makes them both naive (who refuses to buy a book to read the dissertation instead?) and potentially damaging to emerging scholars’ careers.
The Academe section of my blog, Super Bon!
Someday I’ll sort this out to make it more useful. Right now there are posts about interviewing, class politics among academics and how to apply for a job when you have one mixed in with all manner of inanity (including such gems as what a PhD comprehensive question on “habitus” might look like if it were multiple choice). I will clearly need to disambiguate (as they say in the business) the category at a later date. In the meantime, happy surfing. Here are a few relevant posts in reverse-chronological order:
On Professional Websites
The Politics of Journal Publishing in Cultural Studies
Reconsidering the Barometer of “Placement”
On Spreading It Around
On Interdisciplinarity and On Managed Interdisciplinarity
Applying for a Job When You Have One
Grad Students: Record Your Meetings With Your Profs
Interview Flashback
Interview Season
Why Have Graduate Students?
Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre and Mental Illness in Academia
Academics and Social Class
Peer Review Ethics and Politics; or, how to review something you hate.
I wrote this for the International Communication Association Newsletter.
Demystifying Tenure
This is a slightly too-improvised talk I gave for McGill’s Career and Placement Services in 2009 for a panel on tenure. My contribution focused on separating myth and fact, understanding the difference between real and fake tenure requirements at your institution and some thoughts on the process. It is just under 15 minutes in length and I say “um” too much because I’m working from notes without practice. On the upside, it’s one of the last recorded hurrahs of my old voice.
Jonathan Gray on the Academic Job Market in Media Studies
It’s happening right now–2010–so take advantage of an ongoing series and read and participate. My excellently-named colleague is providing a wealth of useful perspective on the process from someone who’s been on both sides of it.
Jason Mittell on running a 2009-10 search for a New Media Studies Position at Middlebury
A rare example of an administrator actually providing some useful perspective on the jobsearch process for all to see. Also an interesting exercise in transparency and the limits thereof. I wish I’d thought of it when I ran 3 searches, but then I would have agonized over what I could or couldn’t have made public.
A Few Teaching Resources
I haven’t systematically looked online for good pedagogy support, but I know there’s a lot out there. Here are a few things I like (or wrote) to hold a place for whenever more stuff comes across my desk.
Networking on the Network
Phil Agre has produced a very useful discussion of professional networking in the electronic age. It’s a nice professionalization primer for those who want a better sense of how to navigate the field.
Tomorrow’s Professor
Another stellar career resource online. This link takes you to an archive of posts from the listserv “Tomorrow’s Professor.” You can also subscribe.
Parenting and Professing, by Sharon Downey
Preparing for Conference Presentations, by Fernando Delgado
Advice to Grad Students Preparing for Their First Conference Presentation, by J. Emmett Winn
The three above resources were compiled by University of Texas grad student Kristen Hoerl, who was grad rep for the Critical/Cultural Studies division of NCA in 2003. Kudos and thanks to her for the intiative, and to the authors for agreeing to have their work reprinted here.
Good Advice on Conference Presentations from Paul N. Edwards
Written by technology historian Paul Edwards, this is a nice, short primer on presenting at conferences. His most important piece of advice? Practice! He’s also got a nice piece called, simply, How to Read a Book.
Advice for Grad Students on Publishing by Thom Brooks
A lengthy and clearly written program for novices on how to break into the world of book reviews, journal articles and edited books.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Interviewer, by Charles J. Stivale
Best Feet Forward: Some Moves for the Campus Interview, by Charles J. Stivale
When my friend Charley Stivale heard I was doing this page, he sent me this article. The pieces has a lot of great advice about interviewing at conferences. It was written for people in the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, so the disciplinary presuppositions are different, but the stakes are the same if you’re doing a conference interview (though conference interviews aren’t a precondition to getting jobs in Communication Studies the way they are in MLA disciplines).
Negotiating Starting Salaries
This .pdf guide is the best and most exhaustive resource I’ve seen for thinking about what to do when you get the job offer. Read it BEFORE you get a job offer. Though it’s pitched to Canadians, this is relevant to anyone in Canada or the U.S. who just got offered a job. I know it says “negotiating starting salaries” but there’s a whole lot on other aspects of the job as well.
Nancy Baym’s Questions for the Job Search
A useful list of questions that should should ask on the way to your first–or any–academic job.
More Interviewing and Job Search Resources from Mary Corbin Sies
These are specifically geared toward American Studies students and their market (for instance, people still get jobs in Communication Studies without having books under contract) but the advice is still very good and the list of interview questions is priceless. It reminds me of questions that caught me by surprise when I was first on the market.
A Dozen Sentences That Should be in Your (Academic) Job Application Letter from Phil Howard
This is a great starting point, a kind of “mad libs for cover letters” that will get you writing your first application quickly. Of course, it’s written for ABD students but could easily be adapted for the recent PhD. I would, however, push on two things. 1) If you follow the advice exactly, the letter will look formulaic (as a search committee chair I got real tired of the “people have argued X but I show Y” line, for instance). So mix it up a little once you’ve followed the template. 2) I strongly discourage people from going on to a 3rd page of their cover letter. There are plenty of other opportunities to say stuff about yourself. If you have a reader who says “this person doesn’t get it if they’re going onto a 3rd page of the cover letter” you’ve done yourself a disservice.
A Manual of Best Practices for Meeting the Needs of New Scholars
Don’t let the title fool you. This .pdf is also required reading. The first part is pitched to administrators, but the middle part (pp. 14-21) is pitched to job candidates and assistant professors. Highly recommended. Courtesy the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Tips on Grantwriting from Haidee Wasson
The title is self-explanatory. My friend Haidee Wasson designed this for her students and passed it on to me when she heard I was doing a grantwriting seminar for our students. Canadian humanists apply for grants all the time, and this is becoming more and more the case for humanists in other countries as well. Grantwriting is an art and a skill, and the writing quirks that get you ahead in other areas can trip you up in this one.
Tips on Grantwriting from SSRC
This is an 8-page manual from the Social Science Research Council (US). It’s very useful and standard reading in many disciplines.
A Melange of How-Tos from Eszter Hargittai
Wrting abstracts, publishing articles, organizing conferences, slide presentations and more. Eszter’s audience is social scientists, but apart from the list of journals, the basic advice is the same.
9 Interviews
Somewhere between job advice, documentary and a work of art, this site documents 9 scholars’ progress towards academic employment. MLA-centric but still interesting
David Brake’s Academic Job Links on Netvous
My British counterpart? A list of job- and professionalization- related links on his bookmark site. Lots of adjunct resources as well as tenure track.
Cathy Davidson on How and Why to Make Your Digital Publications Matter
Covers both the mechanics of contribution and how to represent it on your CV. Lots of good tips. Here’s hoping that some of this advice is totally dated in a few years because online publication will be considered a normal part of what we do.
PhD(isabled)
This is an amazing and comprehensive resource, and probably the best out there for the moment. Lots of great stories and advice. See, for instance, “Making PhD Life Easier,” which goes through concrete things you can do to, well, make your life easier. This is a huge issue in our field, and at least around intellectual disabilities of various sorts, still not something well handled or accommodated. And let’s face it, it’s not like profs are trained to deal with it (we’re hardly trained to deal with our own issues, much less the other stuff we are asked to do like manage and counsel). As a grad teacher, I’ve seen all manner of issues. Almost all of them (not all) can be accommodated within the university context, but they have to be acknowledged first. Unfortunately and unfairly, often it’s on the person with a disability to take a leadership role and work out their own solutions. It shouldn’t be, but at least if you know that, you can not worry too much about the fact that your campus’ disability office is probably better equipped to help undergrads get accommodations on tests or for note taking in lectures. There will be more on this subject in this space, hopefully much more.
Carol Stabile on Campus Rape Culture
This is not the kind of thing you usually find on career advice websites, but it is perhaps one of the most important things you can read. Stabile’s “The Rusty Taste of Shame” documents the wide range of ways in which campus rape culture continues to exist for undergraduates, graduate students and faculty (both permanent and contingent). Part of being a professional academic will likely involve encountering it at some point. And part of being a responsible scholar will involve standing up to some form of male domination at some point. This piece doesn’t have a ton of advice on that, but I will keep my eyes out for a companion that might give some useful tips.
The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc
This is not a typical career advice column or a typical case. Instead, the writer is a computer scientist in an assistant professor position at Harvard (Harvard tenures about 15% of their junior faculty, give or take, meaning their assistant professorships are not “tenure track” like at most other schools). Yet, a lot of what she writes is quite applicable to anyone in a high-powered junior job with lots of pressure to perform in one way or another.
New Faculty Majority
There are probably lots of other good organizations for adjuncts/sessionals/part-timers but New Faculty Majority seems to be the most high-profile. They are not particularly international in outlook but any university system with tenure and part-timers has similar problems, and they know what they’re doing. Their Facebook page seems to be more active than their website.
A Manifesto for the Freelance Academic by Katie Rose Guest Pryal
There is a huge amount of literature out there on transitioning out of the “grand narrative” of the traditional academic career. This is a nice, short, to-the-point list of things to do when you decide to stop pursuing a traditional academic career.
Graduate Student Happiness and Well-Being Report
Assembled by the Graduate Assembly at UC-Berkeley. Very interesting reading.
FREE JOB SEARCH RESOURCES
The Chronicle of Higher Ed Jobs Page
This is probably the most encyclopedic resource, and bless their souls, it’s sort of free (see below for details). They list jobs for communication people under a number of categories — but “communications” is listed under “professional” instead of humanities or social science. It’s all arbitrary. You may want to surf the humanities and social science listings anyway, since sometimes appropriate jobs come up there as well. The way the page works is that nonsubscribers can get the previous week’s listings online. Note that the Chronicle does NOT archive, so check the site regularly (I believe stuff now stays up there for a month). But everything in the print copy of the chronicle for that week is also on their site. If you’re in the mood to read Ms. Mentor’s advice for surviving the job search or whatever writers the Chronicle has drummed up to serve you the latest version of job market gloom and doom, it’s all here. Also, there is now a feature where you can have them email you every time job listings appear in a particular category. Very handy! I do recommend a dose of caution before perusing their “first person” columns, however.
The National Communication Association’s “Find a Job” Website
I don’t know how I missed this one, but NCA has catapulted into the 21st century, offering free and searchable job listings in Communication Studies for all comers. Way to go NCA!
CRTNET: Communication Theory and Research Network
CRTNET is a little “Speech-Comm”-y in its orientation, which affects which jobs get listed here. But lots of good positions pop up over the course of the year. You can subscribe or peruse their archives at your leisure.
H-Net’s Humanities and Social Sciences Job Guide
The title says it all. I recommend a full surfing of their listings, which are updated weekly and archived.
Newsletter of the International Communication Association
ICA’s newsletter has a great range of communication jobs, and for now it appears to be free. It is not, however, encyclopedic.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
AEJMC’s job listing service is biased toward journalism and “strategic communication” (advertising, PR, production, etc.) positions but again, lots of good stuff gets listed over the course of the year.
A Communication Studies Job Wiki and a Cinema and Media Studies Wiki
So you sent off a letter in October and it’s February and you wonder if you’ve got a chance: these wikis might tell you. Passed along to me by Ted Gournelos, these are collective resources to counter the vast abyss that your job application enters between the day you drop off the letter and the day you get the interview or the rejection letter. While these sites may contribute to neurotic checking, and their updating requires lots of participants (information seemed hit or miss when I checked), they provide information you can’t get anywhere else. If I’m not mistaken, there are also wikis for other fields. Right now these two are US-centric, but they wouldn’t be if job seekers in other countries joined in. There are also lots of useful and not-so-useful links on the main page.
NOTES: 1) the link address changes each year and 2) the site now features extremely annoying pop up ads in the lower left hand corner. And here’s a critique of the the academic jobs wiki from a recent job-searcher.
Universities to Fear
Again, I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, this is a super-useful resource. as far as I know, job candidates have really no recourse for bad behavior by search committees, so this is a place they can at least warn one another. On the other, stories are unverified and largely personal. For instance, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entry features evidence from a single blog post from Karen Kelsky about her time there. Her experience is so different from mine we might as well have been at different schools. I’m not saying that to defend UIUC–I haven’t been there for over a decade and can’t really speak to the current cultural climate. It’s just that one person’s experience can’t really encapsulate the spirit of an entire campus with tens of thousands of people. All this is to say the site is the most useful when it is the most specific and confirmed (see, e.g., Mississippi State in History for an example).
American Studies Association Newletter: Job Opportunities
Again, I recommend surfing their listings, rather than spending a lot of time trying to land a gig in American Studies. This link takes you to their home page. Job listings are listed under “Current Issue of Newsletter.”
www.higheredjobs.com
Not exhaustive, but lets you search by location.
www.findapostdoc.com
Just for postdocs.
OUTSIDE THE U.S.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it should help get you started. If you know about job markets outside the US and want to suggest some links, drop me a line (jonathan [at] sterneworks [dot] org).
Canada:
University Affairs
It’s standard practice for departments in Canada to list their positions in University Affairs; it should be as comprehensive for Canadian Jobs as the Chronicle of Higher Ed is for US jobs.
Canadian Association of University Teachers
CAUT has also re-launched academicwork.ca, but as of yet there doesn’t seem to be anything in the way of Communication Studies jobs listed.
Canadian Association for Cultural Studies and Canadian Communication Association (see below)
It’s cheap for students to join these two organizations, and most of the jobs in the field in Canada (though certainly not all of them) pop up on their listservs.
UK:
www.jobs.ac.uk
Times Higher Education Supplement
The Times Higher Ed Supplement actually has listings from all over the world, so it’s probably the best single general source for jobs outside the U.S. I’m also told people generally look in The Guardian.
The Netherlands:
Academic Transfer International
Academic, hospital and other vacancies relevant to people with advanced degrees.
Academic Jobs EU
A clearinghouse for academic jobs in the EU
I would welcome suggestions for links to job listings in other countries, especially Australia, New Zealand and other Anglophone countries.
PAY TO PLAY
The people most likely to search for jobs are the very people least likely to be able to afford the steep membership fees for scholarly organizations — even at so-called “reduced” graduate student rates (many cost graduate students over $100 just for membership and conference attendance, leaving aside hotel and travel costs; people with PhDs but part-time salaries, meanwhile, often have no discount at all). So I think it’s a crime that three of America’s largest scholarly organizations in Communication require membership before you can see their job listings. Take a hint from your colleagues at AEJMC and the two ASAs, folks!
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies
As with sociology or American Studies, I don’t really recommend applying for film jobs unless you’re a film scholar with film people writing for you, but other departments looking for media and communication scholars do advertise here.
Commjobs
CIOS/Commserve is pretty social sciency but they are dedicated to developing communication research online. This link takes you to their job network. They post job listnings as they come up, or you can subscribe to a listserv to receive updates as they appear. I was able to procure this service for free in 1999, but they have since started charging for membership (grad students pay less than faculty). You’ll have to decide
if you think it’s worth it.
Canadian Communication Association / Association Canadienne De Communication
The CCA has a new and improved website, but it is now pay-to-play, which means you can’t access most of the good stuff (like the listserv) without joining. The good news is that a student membership is only $30 and probably worth it. The bad news is that a part-time (or sessional, which is Canadian for “adjunct”) is charged a whopping $70, which is only $10 less than a full-time prof, even though the adjuncts are probably bringing in less than the grads. I am seriously going to write to the executive board about this.
The American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association used to publish a newsletter with job info in it but it now appears defunct. Their new site is pay-to-play. Boo! Tips on where to find media sociology positions will be posted should someone send some my way.
Spectra : Newsletter of the National Communication Association
Since NCA starting posting their job listings online, this is no longer as essential.
Another possible resource:
One kind friend tipped me off to the American Philosophical Association; they occasionally lists positions of interest to philosophers of communication and rhetoricians, but their publication — “Jobs for Philosophers” (a great title, IMO) — is only available online to members. So you’ll have to make friends with a philosopher or pay up if you want a peek.
My own scholarship on academic labor politics and the job market:
“The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies”, Feature Special Section of the International Journal of Communication, Volume 5 (2011).
“The Pedagogy of the Job Market,” Journal of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6:4 (December 2009): 421-424.
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