Life After Grad School Both Inside and Outside Academia: Part 1--The Job Search and Job Market

Inspired by Bradley Sommer’s tweet this past summer about the ongoing challenges of the Humanities job market in the U.S., this four part podcast (produced by Erica Bennett, an M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama) talks with an early career scholar now looking for work in academia, a senior scholar with a view from the inside, and those who either earned their doctorate and established a career outside the university or those who decided early on that graduate work was not their preferred career path.

In the first episode of the series, Erica and Jacob Barrett (himself just starting his Ph.D. at UNC Chapel Hill) discuss the challenges of starting a PhD program in the humanities at this particular point in time, gaining some perspective from Bradley Sommer, a recent Ph.D. graduate in History.

About the guest: Bradley J. Sommer earned his Ph.D. in American History from Carnegie Mellon University and is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. He is also an online adjunct professor at Miami University in Ohio. Currently, he is working on a book about Toledo, OH, in the latter half of the 20th century, entitled Tomorrow Never Came: The Making of a Postindustrial City.

About the Study Religion Podcast: this series was first posted in the summer of 2022 on the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies Podcast, which contains a variety of other episodes, all on the wider relevance of scholarship on religion—learn more, or subscribe, here.

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