Books that I Bought at the AHA Conference

Every time that I attend the AHA and ASCH conferences I always visit the main book exhibit. Even though the AHA book exhibit pales by comparison to that of the annual American Academy of Religion, I relish the idea of wandering the booths and reading blurbs of new historical works. As a religious historian, however, I try to limit my purchases to books in that specific discipline.

On this occasion, I limited my purchased to two books, which I can't wait to read. My first purchase was John Corrigan's new book on Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America, published recently by the University of Chicago Press. I had planned on attending the ASCH session devoted to a discussion on Corrigan's new book, but ended up missing it for various reasons. One of my former students at UTC is currently in the graduate program at FSU and has told me about a class that he took with Corrigan on "space" and religion. This intrigued me to buy the book and read his interpretation of how space (or the lack thereof) relates to Christianity.

Secondly, I bought a copy of Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia Dayton and Sharon Salinger. I have mentioned before in this blog how there are surprisingly very few modern books on colonial Boston. This book is about Boston's unwanted residents, namely poor immigrants who were pushed out of the city so that the established members of the community would not have to provide them with financial relief. This should be a great book, and helpful for my research on life in colonial Boston. Salinger wrote an excellent monograph on Taverns and Drinking in Early America that included lots of great material on Boston, and so I anticipate that this will be another solid piece of scholarship.

Now that I am back from the AHA and ASCH conferences it is time to get ready for the start of the spring 2016 semester, which begins for me on Tuesday.

Washington D.C. Bound

I am traveling today to Washington D.C. for the American Society of Church History annual conference. I look forward to hearing Bruce Hindmarsh's presidential address, "The Inner Life of Doctrine: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Calvinist-Arminian Debate among Methodists," as well as many of the very interesting papers listed on the conference program.

On Friday, January 3, from 8:30am-10:00am, I am giving a paper entitled, "The Role of Samuel Kneeland and Daniel Henchman as Jonathan Edwards's Chief Printer and Publisher at Boston." The title of the session is: "Printing Evangelicalisms: Evangelical Book Culture across Three Century." Along with myself, Keith Grant, a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick, will be speaking on "Reading the Evangelical Atlantic in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia," and Daniel Vaca, visiting fellow at Princeton's  Center for the Study of Religion, on "Book Bound: The Paradox of Fundamentalist Biblicism," with Catherine Brekus providing commentary.

Please don't forget to check out the session on Friday, January 3, from 10:30am-12:00pm entitled, "Evangelicalism in Modern Britain Turns Twenty-Five: Re-Examining David Bebbington's 'Quadrilateral' Thesis," sponsored by UTC and the Maclellan Foundation and chaired by Tim Larsen. It should be a lively event, with panelists Thomas Kidd, Amanda Porterfield, and Kelly Elliot giving papers that analyze Bebbington's definition of evangelicalism, and a final commentary by Bebbington. If all goes well, the Maclellan Foundation and UTC will sponsor another session on the 25th anniversary of Evangelicalism and Modern Britain at the Conference on Faith and History meeting at Pepperdine University next fall, with a completely new set of panelists.

AHA Study on PhD Graduates

The AHA has recently released results from a study of 2,500 PhD graduates in history, between the years 1998 and 2009 (click here).

Below is a summary of the results:

• The overall employment rate for history PhDs was exceptionally high: only two people in the sample appeared unemployed, and none of them occupied the positions that often serve as punch lines for jokes about humanities PhDs—as baristas or short order cooks.
• Just over half of the PhDs in our sample—50.6 percent—were employed on the tenure track at a four-year institution, and another 2.4 percent held tenure-track positions at two-year colleges (Figure 1).
• Specialists in US history were nearly 25 percent less likely to be employed on the tenure track than were specialists in other fields, but significantly more likely to be employed in history work outside the professoriate.
• Receiving a PhD from a top-ranked institution improved the odds of making it onto the tenure track at a research university.
• Gender played little role in employment patterns across particular professions and industries.
• Nearly two-thirds of the PhDs in academic positions remained in or near the region in which they earned their degrees, but faculty who remained in the same region as their doctoral studies were significantly more likely to be employed off the tenure track.

Perspectives on History: September 2013

The September 2013 issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History is available. I found two articles in the magazine very interesting.

The first is entitled, "The Next Big Thing: Supporting the Second Book," by Kenneth Pomeranz, the current present of the AHA. In his essay, Pomeranz seeks to answer the question: "are there ways to make things easier for people who have trouble finishing a second book?"

Here is a sample of his comments on this topic:

Given my own story, I'm particularly interested in cases where family responsibilities make it hard to get enough time at archives—something that I suspect has become more common since so many more academics are now part of two-career couples than used to be the case, more academics are women (who still bear more than half of care responsibilities in most families), and the average age at first tenure-track appointment has climbed slowly but steadily over the last 20 years. But the problems can take other forms as well, and we know they are common. On average, historians now at full professor took longer to get from associate to full than from assistant to associate, and some never advance at all. 

From some perspectives, this might seem to be an oddly narrow approach to the problem of slow promotion. One could ask why we should weight research so heavily in the first place, rather than giving more equal weight to the various ways that people can contribute to their institutions? Some places do put greater weight on teaching than research, and perhaps more should do so; certainly teaching should count for more than most people think it currently does at research universities. But for current purposes, what matters is that most of the more desirable tenure-granting institutions (including good baccalaureate colleges) do insist on a vigorous, ongoing research program for promotion... And it does no historian any good—as a teacher or otherwise—to feel stalled as a researcher, whether or not their other efforts get recognized. 

One of Pomeranz's suggestions is to pair junior faculty members with senior scholars in order to encourage productivity.

After thinking about Pomeranz's thoughts on this subject, I wondered what should count as a scholarly second project. Should co-edited volumes, for instance, be given the same weight as a monograph? I was pleased to see another helpful piece addressing some of my questions. Paula Findlen offers her thoughts on this topic in her essay, "What Counts: On Books, Articles, and Productivity."

Below is a sample:

Last year I actually finished three different books but none of them is a monograph. One is the outcome of a workshop that required substantial editing, thinking, and an introduction to become the book it deserved to be. Another is an English translation of a book by a distinguished Roman colleague with a foreword, the result of a very enjoyable collaboration between me, the author, and two former doctoral students. Finally, I am one of several authors of a catalogue raisonné, a multi-pronged project that offers the opportunity to work with a wonderful team of curators and access to two decades of accumulated research materials.

I wrote a number of scholarly articles that I owed to other people's projects, gave some papers, turned a lecture for an annual society meeting into the publication required immediately after the event, and made decent progress on two long-term book projects. I did review essays for the Nation and I am also in the midst of a group project, Mapping the Republic of Letters, that emphasizes digital presentation of data, visualizations, and preliminary findings. Partway through sabbatical, I became a historical consultant for a television series. Lots of fun but definitely not a book.

In short, it was a great sabbatical, productive by almost any standard except one: if I were going up for tenure or even promotion to full professor with this profile, my colleagues might wring their hands in utter consternation at my puzzling career choices. Virtually none of my output is refereed, nothing is monographic, and it appears scattered and diffuse. Speaking as a former department chair who has overseen many tenure and promotion cases and served on the university appointments and promotions committee, I am not alone in lamenting the ways in which we are trapped in obsessions with genre when reviewing the work of our colleagues and constrained, as a result, in the advice that we offer.

Findlen goes on to champion non-traditional projects that make valuable contributions to the study of history, even though they are not monographs.

Both articles force junior scholars, such as myself, to evaluate their publication goals. While I am drawn to the monograph, I should be open to exploring other non-traditional projects, if it is something that I am passionate about producing, and would make a significant contribution to the field in which I am working.

Day 3 at AHA

On my last day at the AHA/ASCH conferences, I attended a Conference on Faith and History session in the morning on Darren Dochuk's recent book, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservativism. Daniel Williams of the University of West Georgia and Molly Worthen of UNC-Chapel Hill commented on Dochuk's book, offering high praise for this groundbreaking piece of scholarship.

Williams pointed out how Dochuk has opened the door for further scholarship and analysis of lesser-known 20th-century evangelicals, besides the usual suspects of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson. Williams further highlights that Dochuk has shifted the study of 20th-century fundamentalism from beyond the Midwest and South to include the role of Southern California. Worthen, for her part, pondered why Dochuk did not spend much time analyzing the theology of evangelicalism at any great length, wondering if he should have summarized specif beliefs such as premillennial dispensationalism and Holiness teachings.

While both commentators had the opportunity to critique From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, Dochuk himself provided the harshest criticism of his book. He submitted that the final chapters were not as thorough as his earlier chapters, and that he perhaps should have interacted with the small, but important, rising contingent in the evangelical left. It was a good session, and I enjoyed talking with other CFH members before the panel discussion at the breakfast reception.

The second and final session I attended was the presidential address for the ASCH conference given by Laurie Maffly-Kipp of UNC-Chapel Hill on "The Burden of Church History." Laurie challenged the society to expand its membership beyond white Protestants to include Catholics and Mormons, as well as non-American scholars. I look forward to hearing Bruce Hindmarsh's presidential lecture next year.

Day 2 at AHA

 On day two of the AHA/ASCH conferences, I attended two sessions. The first was entitled "Funding Your Research," from 10:30am to 12:00pm. The session was chaired by Laura Isabel Serna of the University of Southern California, and included two other panelists, Deborah Harkness of the University of Southern California, and Raul Ramos of the University of Houston.

Deborah Harkness and Laura Isabel Serna offered the following advice to graduate students and junior faculty:

• Start by applying for small grants
• Once earning one-month grants at specific archives, then try for three-month grants before attempting to apply for long-term NEH-sponsored fellowships
• Diversify your applications

Raul  Ramos followed up with some additional helpful hints:

• Mine "acknowledgement" sections in books for potential grants
• Make sure you read and follow the application requirements carefully
• When possible, review successful applications, noting the style and content
• Ask your colleagues to look over your application
• Attend your university's grant-writing seminars

While much of this advice may fall under the category of common sense, this panel reminded me of how important it is do as many things right as possible when applying for competitive grants.

The second session I attended was entitled "The Private Lives and Social Worlds of Eighteenth-Century Religious Women," from 2:30pm to 4:30pm. Bruce Hindmarsh of Regent College chaired the session and panelists included Phyllis Mack of Rutgers, Joanna Cruickshank of Deakin University, and Cindy Aalders, a PhD student at Lincoln College, Oxford.

This was an excellent session that drew from the expertise of many Methodist scholars in the room, including Dick Heitzenrater. I felt humbled as I reflected on my own knowledge of Methodism when compared to these distinguished scholars. Interestingly, all three panelists seemed to confirm that diary writing, from the perspective of many eighteenth-century women, was not a private affair. Rather, diaries were intended to be passed along to others within certain circles, and sometimes meant to be published. While it is known that John Wesley and George Whitefield intended that their diaries should be published, it has been assumed by many historians that women penned their thoughts in solitary confinement, intending to use their personal narratives for individualistic spiritual growth.

Now it's time to reflect on these sessions over more great New Orleans food!

First Day at AHA

Today, I arrived at New Orleans for the first day of the annual AHA/ASCH conferences.

After making my way to the hotel and settling in, I perused the book exhibit for an hour or so. I was surprised that Eerdmans did not reserve a booth this year. Eventually, I made my way to the NYU Press booth where I bought Ava Chamberlain's The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards, recalling Doug Sweeney's review of it on the JEC blog. I also talked myself into buying David Swartz's The Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservativism after finding out from the UPenn Press representative that I could purchase the display copy at half the price provided that I wait until Saturday evening to pick it up. After visiting the book exhibit, I meandered down Bourbon Street where I enjoyed a bowl of delicious Gumbo.

Later that evening I attended a panel chaired by Bill Cronon (the current president of the AHA) on "The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age." This was an interesting session in which five other panelists spoke about the growing pains of the history profession (and publishing industry) in the current digital age.

Despite the rising popularity of e-books, I continue to purchase all my texts in print form. In fact, I purposely don't own a tablet or e-reader. I want to own physical books that I can see the cover, hold in my hands as I read, and, most importantly, highlight thoughout. This is how I learn, and I hope to continue this practice regardless of where the publishing industry is headed. That being said, I appreciated some of the innovative perspectives from the panelists about the ways that students learn today (utilizing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, for instance), and suggestions for how historians should write in this fast-pace environment.

I look forward to attending some of the ASCH sessions tomorrow, and eating more great food!