I’m speaking later this month about Literature Ph.D. career paths for the University of Maryland’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies—huge thanks to them for hosting, and to Nat McGartland for organizing and facilitating the conversation. I hope to post my talk notes afterward, but for now I’m sharing some of the projects and resources that I’ll mention in my talk. Edit: The talk is now posted.

Various DH, literature Ph.D., and career resources

• Join the DH Slack for asking questions and learning about new projects, jobs, tools
• ACH is your DH scholarly org, and they’re doing fantastic (and free) professional development Zooms this spring
• If you’re at UMD like my talk is, a few of the variety of DHy groups at UMD are:
  • AADHUM (African American Digital Humanities initiative)
  • MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities)
  • irLhumanities (Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities).
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s syllabus for her graduate course on “Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing” for more on the variety of forms academic writing can take.
• Hannah Alpert-Abrams’ excellent, free(!) workbook Finding Your Purpose: A Higher Calling Workbook for Justice-Oriented Scholars in an Unjust World
  • I also highly recommend Hannah’s writing in general, e.g. “Open letter to my friend, who I love, who wants to get a PhD in literature” (“What I can tell you is that you already have everything you require to write, to teach, to be a voice for your community. Fuck credentials. You are already extraordinary and powerful and valuable in this world.”)
  • Also created by Hannah! Academic Job Market Support Network for example materials shared by folks from all sorts of humanities-background job interviewing (CVs, job talk text, covers letters…)
• HASTAC Fellowships for learning to blog about the humanities in a supportive space, and find people doing similar work
• As a proud union member in Virginia’s higher ed worker collective UCWVA, wanted to give a shoutout to UMD’s graduate student union:
  • UMD grad students are “fighting for the legal right to collectively bargain and form a union, for better and safer working conditions, livable wages, and social, political, and economic justice for all University System of Maryland (USM) workers and community members.” More info and to join
• Job searching when salary is only described as “competitive”:
  • State-funded universities make the salaries they pay available by FOIA request, so you can often find information on what specific roles are currently making (e.g. in the campus newspaper) if you want to get a sense of what folks in similar roles to one you wish to apply for are actually currently making (though it’s hard to know factors like how long they’ve been in the role or the field.)
  • If you want to know the salary range for a job ad but it isn’t posted and you’re not comfortable asking yourself, I am happy to do this for anyone without mentioning your name (email amandavisconti@gmail.com or ask via DH Slack DM)

More about my work

• Blogging at LiteratureGeek.com, including throughout my dissertation both about my research and larger questions of how to get an unusual dissertation done
  • Scholars’ Lab “Year of Blogging”
• DH dissertation (UMD English Department 2015): dr.amandavisconti.com
• Twitter: @literature_geek
• Mastodon: @literature_geek@mstdn.social and @Literature_Geek@hcommons.social
• Quinn Dombrowski’s list of DH people to follow on Mastodon
• The Scholars’ Lab