Doctoral Futures at AHA 2026

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review.

Last month I once again had the pleasure of attending the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, and, for me, it was one of the best AHA’s I’ve ever been a part of. It didn’t hurt that it was in one of my favorite cities—Chicago—and, of course, I enjoyed catching up with friends and colleagues from around the country, many of whom I only ever see at AHA. But a real highlight was seeing the momentum building at the conference, and in the field of history more broadly, around history podcasting. In fact, all of the sessions I participated in this year were podcasting related in some way, as part of the Sinclair Workshop on Historical Podcasting, a series of sessions made possible by the same donation that created the Sinclair Prize for Historical Podcasts. And in case you don’t know, the Sinclair Prize this year went to Mackenzie Martin, Suzanne Hogan, and the team at Kansas City’s KCUR for the terrific podcast A People’s History of Kansas City—really worth a listen whether you have any connection to Kansas City or not. This year I moderated a keynote session with the Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, hosts and producers of the award winning NPR podcast Throughline. I also co-led a developmental conversation with a small group of folks with podcasts in some stage of production. And to round out the series, my colleague Jim Ambuske of the podcast Worlds Turned Upside Down chaired a panel on the topic of storytelling with podcasters Saniya Ghanoui of Sexing History, James Mirabello of People’s Recorder, Kate Carpenter of Drafting the Past, and the aforementioned Sinclair Prize winner Mackenzie Martin. On top of all that, and very much informally, we had a history podcasters meetup on Friday evening where even more podcasters showed up and swapped info on their respective projects. I had so many great conversations, and it affirmed what I already knew—that there is so much great work being done and an increasing interest in utilizing podcasting and the audio medium to engage new and broader audiences with the work of history.

In thinking about the great time I had at this AHA, my mind began to wonder back to the first few I attended as a graduate student. I was exposed to a wide array of historical projects, to be sure, but I was also a first generation college grad struggling with how I was supposed to navigate the professional academic world, including how would faire after my grad program in an increasingly tough job market for history PhDs.

And that leads me back to something Sarah Weiksel mentioned in the last episode, about a new joint initiative the AHA is taking part in called Doctoral Futures, which has the aim of more systematically addressing some the challenges people like me deal with in grad school. And when I wasn’t attending a podcasting session this year, I had the chance to sit down with Stacy Hartman, Program Officer for Higher Education Initiatives with the American Council of Learned Societies, the organization playing a coordinating role in the Doctoral Futures project.

Stacy Hartman
I’m Stacey Hartman. I’m the Program Officer for Higher Education Initiatives with the American Council of Learned Societies. There is a set of problems in doctoral education that have persisted for some time. The overarching one, I would say, is that there have not been enough academic jobs for everyone who wants an academic job for probably 50 years. That has been true for a long time now, and there have been periodic dips in the academic market. So, if you look at the academic market since about 1979, you’ll see these periods where it goes way down. So, you know, the recession, covid, and then it comes back up, but it almost never has come back up to the to its previous level. So, there’s been a steady through line of decline in academic jobs. At the same time, programs have continued to train people as though everyone was going to get an academic job, and so that has been a significant problem for a number of years. Much of the current effort started as an attempt to address that problem, to first of all recognize the many, many, many, many PhDs in history and all other fields that have gone on to other types of employment. Historically, those folks who often have really interesting, vibrant careers have been ignored by the Academy. And so that was the first goal is like, recognize those folks, learn from them, and see if the academy could support people better in pursuing a range of employment. Once you start to pull on that thread, a bunch of other threads begin to unravel, and you sort of see that there are a number of ways in which doctoral education is not serving its students as well as it could be, and in particular, as cohorts, as graduate cohorts, for example, as cohorts begin to diversify. People come in with varying levels of knowledge about the academy, varying levels of understanding about how the academy is structured, how hierarchies function within the academy. There’s this whole host of underlying assumptions that people, for example, whose parents were faculty members, who represent a not insignificant portion of people who come into PhD programs every year, they have instinctual understandings of that, that people who don’t come in with that background do not understand. And so as we’ve had more first generation graduate students and more people from various backgrounds, there needs to be better and more explicit support that happens. And so I’d say that’s the set of problems that the project is trying to address. Doctoral Futures is a three year effort funded by the Mellon Foundation to address some long standing issues in doctoral education, among them issues with academic hiring, non academic careers for PhDs, and preparing people better for those issues of admissions and recruitment, preparing undergraduates for doctoral study, and then issues related to graduate curriculum. So whether that is coursework, exams, the dissertation, and the perennial issue of mentorship, that is one that has come up a lot. So the program is designed to address those long standing issues, not necessarily by coming up with new solutions, but by making the solutions, strategies, practices, models that have been developed in many different places through the efforts of many different people to make those more accessible and widespread. Currently we have three committees that have been established. So the first committee, which is led by Steve Davidson from the Society of Biblical Literature, is focused on everything that happens up to the first day of graduate school, so we’re calling that the preparation and inclusion committee that includes recruitment and admissions. It includes pipeline programs. It includes undergraduate research opportunities, which are very important, we know, for people who want to go to grad school. It also includes financial aid packages. The second group, which is led by Paula Krebs and Jason Rody from the Modern Language Association, is focused on the graduate program, which includes the graduate curriculum. It also includes mentorship, for example. And then the third Committee, which is led by Sarah Wexel and Dana Schaffer from the American Historical Association, is focused on post PhD Career Pathways and also preparation for non academic pathways within the curriculum as well. And so those three committees are currently meeting regularly. We are in something of an information gathering or research phase. So Katina Rogers, who is the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, a fabulous book that I recommend to everybody if they have not yet read it. She is serving as the research consultant on the project and so she’s conducted a number of sort of landscape analysis of pre existing research, and she’s also talked to many, many people, students, faculty, staff members about their experiences with graduate education. And we are beginning to pull out some themes that appear to be very important. The committees will sort of decide where they want to focus in on and then over the course of the next, I’d say, nine or 10 months, we are going to start developing a set of recommendations, a menu of options. So one of the challenges with this is that there’s no one size fits all solution. Institutions are very, very different from one another. Sometimes they’re different in ways that are more subtle, but are still really significant. And so what works at one place is not likely to work at another. And so we want to develop a range of options where we can say this is what works based on our best knowledge and our understanding of the situation. But people can choose from among this range of options. This recommendation stage, I sort of expect to last through the end of 2026 and then 2027 the third year of the project, is going to be what I think of as the persuasion phase. So, we all know that not everyone is on board with this set of reforms, and we know that there is going to need to be quite a lot of discussion, and some of that is going to be iterative, right? We’re going to hear feedback, we’re going to incorporate it into our recommendations, right? There is going to be a lot of iteration and feedback. We certainly don’t expect that the recommendations will be accepted wholesale everywhere immediately. There’s going to be a lot of conversation, even after the committees finish their work. That having been said, we are hoping to persuade people to adopt and adapt at least some of these recommendations for their institutional context. So we’re going to be meeting with administrators and faculty members at all levels at many different types of universities to have these conversations with the hope of really making significant progress towards moving doctoral education from a model that was developed after World War Two, which is now 80 years in the past, and which has been freeing at the edges for some time, even before the most recent developments, and move it towards something that really serves the needs of 21st Century students, institutions, and society. ACLS is playing, is playing something of a coordinating role, and also, I think, a pretty significant communications role. So we are, in addition to handling a lot of the communication and coordination between the committees, we are also really focused on how to leverage the communities and the constituencies that we already have to get the word out about the project and eventually get feedback from people, and eventually persuade people to sign on to the project. So ACLs has as a main constituency, the it’s 81 member societies. So this is organizations like the American Historical Association, the Society for Biblical Literature, the Modern Language Association and so these are all organizations that are involved in higher ed and doctoral education, because they are organizations related to fields of research. We also have the ACLS Research Consortium, which is a group of about 40 research institutions that work quite closely with ACLS. They all graduate doctoral students in the humanities. They are all deeply invested in this issue. And so ACLS is a really highly networked organization, and so that is the role that we are playing in this. In addition to myself, Trevine Harris is the program manager for the project and then Joy Connolly, the president of ACLS, is the PI on the project.

Daniel Story
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So this is quite a collaborative effort then?

Stacy Hartman
Yes, highly collaborative, yeah.

Daniel Story
Unprecedented, in a way?

Stacy Hartman
That’s an interesting question. Unprecedented is a word that gets a little overused. I would say that changing doctoral education has never been approached in quite because I what I think the strengths of this project are that it brings together people from scholarly associations and faculty members at universities, and administrators at universities and doctoral students, and brings them all together into one room. And so we have many different perspectives that we’re able to sort of bring together. And I do think that is a major strength of the project. So much effort has been put into this, and I feel like I keep saying that, but it’s because I really want to pay tribute to all of the work that has gone before, without which this project would not exist. You could not have done this project 10, 15 years ago. It stands on the shoulders of everybody who did other major graduate education initiatives at places like AHA, for example, which had its career diversity grant back in 2015, I think at the same time that the Modern Language Association had its Connected Academics Grant. And then you also have grants that were given largely from the Mellon Foundation, although also from the NEH to universities across the country that have done a number of really interesting things with doctoral education using the grant money. All of these efforts, many of them were in many ways successful, but their successes sort of didn’t make it beyond their point of origin. And so that is really what we’re trying to do. And we’re trying to take what we have learned and push it forward and push it outward. And that is what I see, is what this grant is doing that others have not but it stands on all of the work that has come before. This is like a particular crisis moment in doctoral education. I always want to say this project did not come about in response to that crisis moment in graduate education, which is being driven largely by federal funding cuts, although not only by federal funding cuts, but this project was in the works before all of that happened. It was originally a response to a call from the NEH, but we are trying not to respond solely to that crisis, right? It takes more of a long view. It’s sort of look it’s looking ahead, and I am hopeful that we will end up in a stronger position on the other side of this, I think things might look quite different than they currently do, but I hope that we can develop sustainable, long term models for doctoral education, because my fear in this moment is that we become diminished versions of what we have been, rather than transforming into something that is future facing and ready to move forward. For people who are listening, who might want to get involved with the project, I would recommend that you go onto our website, acls.org/doctoral-futures, and you can first of all see we’re going to be publishing work to the to the website over the coming months, but you can also sign up for our newsletter. We will not spam you. It is a quarterly newsletter, so I promise that you’re not going to get a ton of email from us, but when we need feedback, for example, on our recommendations, it is likely that we will recruit at least partially through our newsletter. So, if you want to be involved, I’d say sign up for our newsletter. Look at it when it lands in your inbox, and keep an eye out for opportunities. That’s the best way to get involved with the project right now. Great. Well, thank you.

Daniel Story
Yeah, thanks for your time. Thanks for your work on this.

That was my AHA 2026. And I have to conclude with one last shout out to all my fellow history podcasters. If you’re listening, keep up the good work. And I hope to hear from you, or maybe even see you at the next AHA in New Orleans in 2027. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story. That’s it for now. See you next time.