Job-Seekers: Prepping for the Fall Job Market in the Summer

In eighteenth-century novels, it seems that all a character needs to get a job is a good reputation and a personal recommendation—a letter from a lord, count, or other patriarch who will vouch for him or her. Unfortunately, today’s process of applying for jobs in academia is increasingly arcane, complex, and rife with opportunities for mistakes. The job market in the fall is fast and furious, with schools advertising as early as August 1^st for the following year, followed by a steady trickle until the flood gates open on the MLA list on September 15^th (at least in literary studies). Many schools have a November 1^st deadline, but some have started to put out October 15^th and even October 1^st deadlines, so it is imperative that you start working on your documents over the summer.

Below is my guide to the key documents you will need for the fall market, keeping in mind that jobs advertised in the fall are mostly tenure-track positions (the spring and summer markets are much more mixed) and visiting assistant professor positions. My own experience is of the English lit job market, so that will define my slant on things. There are many other good sources out there, however, that cover similar ground and are worth checking out for additional help. See my list at the end of this post.

1.      CV: Every job you will apply for will ask for an academic CV. This is the one constant. I used Dr. Karen’s Rules of the Academic CV, so I highly recommend it. Some jobs will require you to fill out an online job application where you must list all the same information that is on your CV in addition to asking for a regular CV. Why is this? I can only surmise that it is because at some universities, HR departments screen all the candidates first before forwarding on their credentials to the search committee. The HR people use the website form & the committees look at the actual CV, so just be prepared for lots of redundancy. This is also a good reason to have the following on hand:

a.       A list of past & current jobs, plus titles, addresses of the main office, name of your supervisor and a phone number (good idea to contact past supervisors and let them know you’re listing them on applications!)

b.      A list of places you have lived in the past 10 years, including addresses (this has come up for me on several applications!)

c.       A list of the universities/colleges where you received your degrees, the credit hours logged for those degrees, the date of graduation

2.      Cover Letter: Another constant. Every job will require one. For the fall market, you don’t really need to worry about a teaching oriented letter; focus on the research letter (on letterhead if possible). Again, I’m going to direct you to Dr. Karen (aka “The Professor is In”) for her words of wisdom on how to avoid sounding like a graduate student in your letters. There are plenty of example academic letters floating around, so I am not going to belabor the minutiae of the letter. However, it is relevant to emphasize that you need to:

a.       use the word “dissertation” as infrequently as possible (unless you are still working on it & are ABD at time of application); focus instead on your book project or simply “the project”

b.      don’t talk about what you’re “going to” do; discuss everything in the past or present tense. Even if technically you haven’t started working on the book; choose phrases such as “this project explores….” rather than “I plan on exploring” or “this project will explore…” You want to sound like you are already a scholar rather than a student.

c.       don’t overly flatter the school you are applying to but do try to tailor your letter at least a little bit—especially if the ad mentions certain preferred qualities (interdisciplinarity, for example)

d.      create a “master template” letter—or 2 or 3. Look at last year’s job list and figure out which kinds of jobs you might apply to and then make your master template—a cover letter with the spots for the address of the school, the name of the chair & university, and anything else school-specific left empty. This way when you want to improve your letters mid-stream, you just update the template. When you apply to each school, you save it as a new file with the name of the school. This method will save you a lot of time!

3.      Teaching Philosophy or Statement of Teaching: Not all schools will ask for this, but enough will that it is worth your time to create one over the summer. This can be anywhere from 1 to 2 pages single-spaced, though some schools may be more specific about this requirement. Basically, the teaching statement should showcase the variety of courses you have taught, whatever methods you use that set you apart from other instructors, and specific examples of interesting things you have done in the classroom. The best case scenario for the teaching statement is that someone will read it and say, “Wow, I want to try that in my classroom, too!” You also need to emphasize how your teaching methods relate to your research methods. If you are a feminist scholar, then how does this methodology affect your teaching style? Avoid lists; focus on specific examples of classroom activities and try to include a key word or two that define your teaching style.

4.      Research Statement or Research Interests: While this is not frequently required, it might be a good exercise anyway to help you figure out your teaching philosophy and maybe even help you formulate parts of you cover letter. And of course some schools do require it. This is the place where you can discuss past, current and a little bit of future research. You can mention conference presentations, articles, and discuss the book project in more depth. If you are involved in larger research projects (like digitization projects) or if you have organized conferences, panels or writing groups with other scholars, this would also be the place to mention it. Again, avoid listing; try to sound put together by focusing on your key terms that define you as a researcher.

5.      Transcripts: Some schools will ask for official; most will ask for unofficial. It is important, however, to get this all figured out as soon as possible. A portfolio service like Interfolio will get official transcripts for you (for a price of course) and keep them on hand to send out whenever you need, so get the ball moving on that asap. Getting your unofficial transcripts and scanning them is also a good idea. Additionally, I recommend using PDF Merge to merge all your transcripts into 1 PDF for schools that desire them this way. If you just got your PhD, you may need to wait a bit for your doctoral degree to appear on your transcript. It can take up to 8 weeks after you actually graduate toyou’re your transcript updated, so keep an eye on it!

6.      Letters: DO NOT WAIT to ask your recommenders for letters of recommendation. Be aggressive; people will tell you they don’t have time over the summer, but don’t ask anyway. Some great school might have an October 1^st deadline, and you don’t want to miss out because they want letters and yours aren’t ready. Start bugging your committee (nicely) for those letters over the summer; send them your cover letter, CV and whatever else they ask for. Don’t just focus on your committee, either. Get a teaching letter from someone you worked for who has seen you teach or get someone to observe you. Get a letter from an outside reader. Just don’t wait; and after asking, bug them every 2 weeks in the summer, and every week as the semester gets closer.

7.      Student Evaluations: Yes, some schools are going to ask you for student evaluations from courses you have taught. Get your hands on them, scan the best ones, get a variety if possible. Save them both separately and as a merged PDF. Then merge that with your teaching philosophy. Then merge that document with corresponding syllabuses. Have any many different versions of these documents on hand, because some schools will want a “teaching portfolio” while others will want just the evaluations. Still others will ask for “evidence of teaching excellence,” so you might want to send the whole thing—or maybe just the evaluations and syllabuses.

8.      Dissertation abstract: Many job applications don’t require this, but if you have some extra time at the end of the summer, it might not be a bad idea to whip one up. Again, try to minimize the word “dissertation” and focus on the main arguments and what you are contributing to the field with this project. Usually about 1.5-2pp. single-spaced.

Wow, long post today…well, this should give you an idea of how much work it is to be “on the market.” The more you can do over the summer, the happier you will be come September. Everyone is going to try to give you advice; my advice is take their advice for a while (with a grain of salt, as you will undoubtedly get conflicting advice), and then do what works for you.  Your letters and statements of teaching will no doubt change and get updated as time goes by, and so will your CV as you have more things to add to it. Having somewhere to start, however, will make everything much easier. Remember also to make time for proofreading and copy-editing. Any time you change the content of your documents, double-check that there are no typos or other editorial issues.

Here are some more resources. Good luck!

“Preparing NOW for Next Year’s Job Market” from ProfHacker

Dr. Karen’s Page on Academic Cover Letters

More Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market on the Chronicle

Brown University list of Job Market Resources

UCSD Academic Job Search Survival Handbook for Graduate Students

Leggy Ladies: 18C Attitudes Towards Legs

James Gillray's "Fashionable Contrasts" explicitly channels sex through legs & feet.

Gillray's cartoon depicts
ladies of questionable virtue
with their legs showing
from under their skirts.

Eighteenth-century dress, as most of us know, required women to wear long skirts, petticoats, and/or dresses to cover up as much of their legs as possible. A “short skirt” was one that revealed a lady’s ankle(!), and ladies who showed leg were considered titillating, inappropriate, or downright immoral. On the other hand, women who cross-dressed were often admired for their show of a “well-turned leg.” A quote from Bernard Mandeville describes this double-bind perfectly:

If a woman at a merrymaking dresses in Man’s clothes, it is reckon’d a Frolick amongst Friends…Upon the Stage it is done without Reproach, and the most Virtuous Ladies will dispense with it in an Actress, tho’ every Body has a full view of her Legs and Thighs, but if the same Woman, as soon as she has Petticoats on again, should show her Leg to a Man as high as her Knee, it would be a very immodest Action, and every body will call her impudent for it.

Peg Woffington, here as
"The Female Volunteer," was
often admired for her
luscious legs.

In fact, what made women’s legs so titillating was precisely the fact that they—and the crotch at the top of the legs—were hidden, invisible and unmentionable in normal dress. According to costume historian Ann Hollander, while men’s clothing tended to emphasize the body and “demonstrate the existence of a trunk, neck and head with hair, of movable legs, feet and arms, and sometimes genitals,” women’s clothes and particularly the skirt, which “hid women from the waist down and thus permitted endless scope for the mythology of the feminine, had become a sacred female fate and privilege, especially after it became firmly established as a separate garment.”

The separation of the legs seemed to allude, all too clearly, to the genitalia between them, making breeches on women an overtly sexual spectacle. Even actresses had to contend with the condemnation of eighteenth-century moralists on the topic of breeches parts and travesty, while all women were aware that the showing of legs was an immoral act often associated with prostitution.

Oh Henry!
Look at your
bulging...calves!

This is not to say, of course, that men’s legs were not sexualized in one way or another, either. Eighteenth-century texts and earlier Renaissance texts emphasize slim ankles and bulging calves as being the definition of a graceful gam in a gentleman. Henry VIII, for example, was revered for his muscular calves, a fact remarked on by the Venetian ambassador in 1515: “His majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on…with an extremely fine calf to his leg.”

The difference between men’s and women’s legs seems mostly to be that an exposed male leg was accepted and expected in the eighteenth century, while the appearance of a feminine leg was, in most cases, not. Women who cross-dressed were seen as transgressors of gender codes, but, if they were attractive enough, then their leg exposure was also acceptable. All women who cross-dressed or even momentarily donned trousers to, for example, ride more comfortably on horseback (like the real Queen Caroline Mathilde who I wrote about last week!), were able to take advantage of the greater mobility that trousers afforded.

 

The trousers of female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reade in this engraving
suggest a level of comfort and mobility inaccessible to women in dresses and petticoats.

Thus, trousers were always, in a sense, a way for women to rebel, for they signaled independence, freedom, and increased mobility. This doesn’t mean that women in trousers weren’t sometimes co-opted by patriarchal projects designed to recruit men to the army, to arouse men sexually, or to put female bodies on display for consumption. Pants and legs are much more complex signifiers in the eighteenth century than just that; the images I include here as well as the remarks by Mandeville indicate the multifaceted, at times ambiguous nature of the female leg, and legs more generally, in eighteenth-century English society.

Isaac Cruikshank's cartoon satirizes the growing interest in ballet at the end
of the 18th century and its exposure of female legs...and other bits.

18C on Film: A Royal Affair (2012)

I finally got around to watching the Danish film A Royal Affair, which came out in 2012 and has been streaming on Netflix for a while. It tells the story of King Christian VII of Denmark, his English bride (Caroline Matilda, sister to George III, of England), her illicit affair with Christian’s personal physician Johann Struensee, as well as the struggle over bringing Enlightenment ideas to eighteenth-century Denmark.

The official English-language movie poster.

Knowing pretty much nothing about Denmark in the eighteenth century, I found the film fascinating from a cultural and historical perspective. After the film, I did a little online fact-checking, and, for the most part, the general outline of events as presented in the film is more or less accurate. The costumes, wigs, sets and props are very reminiscent of The Duchess, and, hence, gorgeous and historically-accurate. Though a little on the long side, the film keeps viewers’ attention through excellent performances by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who played the English & Danish-speaking Queen Caroline, and Danish actors Mikkel Følsgaard & Mads Mikkelsen who played the King and his cheating physician, respectively.

Just one of Queen Caroline's many many gorgeous gowns in the film.

In many ways, the film is typical of the type. It depicts an unhappy arranged marriage, a woman who must endure her husband’s attentions in bed until she is pregnant with an heir, and an illicit affair that, we know, can only end badly. Similar tropes abound in Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and the British film The Duchess (2008) to name just a few more recent examples.

What makes A Royal Affair different, aside from its being in Danish and set in Denmark, is the film’s perspective on the Enlightenment ideals that royal physician Streunsee and the Queen espoused and attempted to bring to Denmark. The conditions in the country, including abuse of peasants and serfdom, surface frequently in the film, and conversations between characters often reference the ideas of French philosophes such as Rousseau and Voltaire. The notion of personal freedom is explored in a larger context, going beyond just the implications for the upper classes, whose freedoms are examined in similar films.

The fight for personal and political freedoms becomes increasingly fraught in the film as the Queen and Struensee become entangled in a love affair while manipulating the King, whose unnamed mental illness renders him at times quite child-like, in order to implement new laws. The laws are ones that we recognize as the pillars of free society: banning censorship, banning torture, banning excessive work weeks for peasants. How can we not admire these laws? But the film depicts how Struensee, in his idealistic desire to implement these laws, ends up manipulating the King—his ostensible friend—in the same ways that the conservatives on the other side did previously.

The film makes it clear that eventually Struensee is just another courtier
waiting to manipulate the King.

Thus, the film refuses to demonize or idealize any of the characters completely while demonstrating the entrenched ideas of the times and the radical quality of notions that we in the Western world often take for granted. The film ends with the Queen’s loyal servant delivering her account of the past events to her children after the Queen’s death. Caroline’s final exhortation to her children, that a better future is in their hands and that a new dawn is finally breaking in Denmark, has modern reverberations as well. In many ways, the film is just as much about our own time as it is about the eighteenth century.

For those of us interested in issues of performance, the film has a lot to say about that as well. Struensee and the King first bond over their mutual love of Shakespeare and, later, Struensee encourages Christian to speak up in council meetings by comparing them to putting on a performance or acting on stage. A masquerade scene, practically requisite in an eighteenth-century costume picture, serves to remind audiences that characters wear masks even without an actual mask to wear. Several scenes take place at the theater and Shakespearean plays, especially Hamlet, are not only enjoyable inside jokes in the film, but also further illustrate the performative nature of good and evil.