Career Diversity for Historians

The AHA's Career Diversity for Historians initiative is working to better prepare graduate students and early-career historians for a range of career options, within and beyond the academy. With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AHA and three dozen departments from around the country are working to explore the culture and practice of graduate education and how it can better support the changing needs of PhD students. Check back often as we develop tools and resources and provide updates on our activities.
More about Career Diversity
Where Historians Work
Where Historians Work is an interactive, online database that catalogs the career outcomes of historians who earned PhDs at universities in the United States from 2004 to 2017.
Recent Events
Since 2012, the AHA's Career Diversity for Historians initiative has supported faculty from over 40 PhD-granting history departments as they strive to help graduate students prepare for a range of careers, both in and beyond the professoriate. Working with teams of faculty leaders and graduate students, the AHA has learned a lot about the challenges early career historians face and the ways departments can better support them. The 2021 AHA Career Diversity Faculty Institute brought together a working group of faculty leaders to consider the purpose and future of doctoral education, drawing on the insights of previous department-based work. Our common goal was to better align doctoral education in participating departments with a more expansive vision of the professional opportunities available to historians and more effectively articulate the value of history and historical thinking.