Name:

Katharina Donn

​PhD Title, Location, Date of Award:

My PhD project focused on trauma and memory in contemporary US-American culture, exploring the entanglement of intimate vulnerability and virtual spectacle that is typical of the globalized present. Routledge published a revised version of my thesis in 2016 under the title ‘A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: representing Vulnerability in a Digitized Present’, but I originally submitted it in 2014 at Augsburg University. I will be eternally grateful to the ‘Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’ (National Academic Foundation, Germany) for providing all necessary funding for my postgrad years!

I am also still active in research – I have just published my second book, The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century (Routledge 2020) because, really, why should research end once you take a job outside of academia? This project is inspired by ecocritical research, and asks how literature matters politically in a world in which horizons of the imagination (and language) can seem scarily limited.

Current Role and Brief Description:

I work as Acting Head of English/ Teacher of English at a small North London Secondary school, which means I spend my days exploring all things literary with 11-18-year-olds, sometimes sparkling with creative curiosity, sometimes swept up by the sheer weirdness of Romeo and Juliet…I am also interested in developing metacognitive styles of teaching and learning, and have worked with the UCL Institute of Education to explore how teachers and students can drive educational research together. When not dealing with the ups and downs of online lessons, I spent most of lockdown developing an English curriculum with more cutting-edge and diverse literary voices.

Other Roles (if any) post-PhD, not including your current role:

I have held a number of teaching and research appointments in the UK, the US and in Germany, including Visiting Professor at the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin (2016 and 2018), a post-doctoral fellowship at Augsburg University, and a junior research fellowship with the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies in London. I have also taught English and German in a variety of secondary school settings, as full-time teacher and as post-doctoral tutor with the charity ‘Brilliant Club’

One example (if relevant) of how you are able to use your PhD skills/expertise in your current role:

Most obviously, I use my PhD skills in my role as ‘EPQ coordinator’ at my school. The EPQ is an extended research project for students in year 12 and 13, and is perhaps the only qualification which gives A-Level students the opportunity to try out what it might feel like to be a university student working on a term paper (or lab project, or art project). Students have near-total autonomy over their own work and lead their own projects, so my role is to coach them in the basics of research and project management – much as I would do with undergraduate university students.

But besides this, I find that the broad horizon and flexibility that comes with having completed a PhD is pretty much invaluable. I am so immersed in contemporary literature because of my ongoing research activities that I find it easy to develop new approaches to what and how we teach, whether this means gauging cross-curricular links between literature and science in our ‘Are we Posthuman?’ unit or introducing voices, texts and text types which are perhaps not as  widely studied in classrooms as they should be, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance being just two examples.

One piece of job advice you wish you’d had prior to finishing your PhD:

I find that there is this mostly unspoken idea that developing a career outside of academia means you have failed – that ‘not getting an academic job’ is used almost synonymously with ‘not getting a job at all’. Or that the PhD is wasted once you take a non-academic job, because after all, ‘would you really have needed the PhD for this’? There’s so much wrong with these ideas that sometimes I find myself at a loss as to how to counter them, and I fear they create unnecessary anxiety for postgrad students. I think the more thinkers and researchers are out and about in our decidedly troubled public sphere, the better.

​I certainly try to counter the all-too-pervasive thoughtlessness of our times in my own small way with school students, and even if I succeed with only a small handful of them, that’s already a step in the right direction. I also found that stepping out of academia with all the challenging questions this brings (and I mean challenging questions literally: “Miss, why do we have to read this?” “Miss, what’s the point?”) has actually sharpened my understanding of why and how my own field of American literature and my own role in it matters in contemporary culture and society. 

Name:

Eilidh AB Hall

PhD Title, Location, Date of Award:

My PhD project looked at how women negotiate their feminisms in the family as depicted in Chicanx contemporary literature (University of East Anglia, 2017).

​Current Role and Brief Description:

I am a civil servant in the second year of the Fast Stream leadership development programme run by the UK government (https://www.faststream.gov.uk/). In my first year, I worked at the Scottish Public Pensions Agency and then was seconded to a Scottish Government Covid-19 Response and Resilience role and worked on all things PPE for the last 6 months. In September, I started a new role at The Office for the Secretary of State for Scotland (aka Scotland Office) and am working on an economic strategy for UKG in Scotland, due to be published early next year.

Other Roles (if any) post-PhD, not including your current role:

Before starting on the Fast Stream, I was in Texas on a Fulbright scholarship. I went to San Antonio in January 2019 for a semester, teaching and researching in a Latinx Studies department at Trinity University. When I returned from Texas, I was unemployed for 4 months before beginning my Fast Stream job. And before that, I had various short-term academic roles including teaching at the University of Glasgow (History) and the University of Aberdeen (Latin American Studies) – these were fixed-term and part-time contracts. I also worked in a children’s book shop, coached lacrosse at a high school, and did some private tuition to try and make a bit more money.

Some of you may also have worked with me in my capacity as Co-Treasurer of BAAS. Nicole Willson and I took up the role of Co-Treasurers in the summer of 2018 and it has been a great way of keeping up with developments in American Studies and, perhaps most importantly for me, maintaining a supportive academic community over the last couple of years.

One example (if relevant) of how you are able to use your PhD skills/expertise in your current role:

A couple of obvious examples of PhD skills spring to mind in response to this prompt.
The first is that of communicating complicated information. In my role in the PPE Division of the Scottish Government, we were regularly preparing minsters and Cabinet Secretaries for committee appearances or for parliamentary business like FMQs, as well as responding to media enquiries and correspondence with the public. This involved gathering and synthesising information from a range of sources, usually delivered in a variety of (sometimes bizarre) styles, and making decisions on what to include and what to cut, all within a quick timeframe and in the style that the particular minister prefers. We do/did this kind of editing and adjusting all the time during our PhDs and it has made this part of my new job much easier. 
The second thing that I thought of is my ability to chair meetings and facilitate discussions in workshops. Just like when we’re teaching or on a conference panel, the ability to make sure everyone’s voice is heard, steer a discussion, (politely) shut down irrelevant tangents, and ensure everyone understands what is being said is so valuable in my role as a civil servant. And it’s a skill that, so far anyway, it seems only a few civil servants possess.

On a slightly different but related note, the process of getting on the Fast Stream is very different from all the other jobs I was applying for at the time – there’s no CV, they don’t know you’ve got a PhD, it’s all based on online tests and then in-person assessments. It’s weird and feels scary not having your academic (and other credentials) shining impressively in front of you but it is all based on skills and behaviours and I can reassure you that you have developed these during your PhD.

One piece of job advice you wish you’d had prior to finishing your PhD:

We all know that the PhD can feel all-consuming and the subsequent hunt for jobs (whether academic or otherwise) is exhausting and oftentimes overwhelming. It’s important that we take a step (or several steps) back from it all on a regular basis, when possible. Find other ways to value your life: friendships, conversations, being out in nature.

One of my favourite writers, Gloria Anzaldúa, calls on us to “do work that matters”. For better or worse (and I often think for worse) academic life makes us think that scholarly work is the only work that matters. But we do work, waged and unwaged, that matters all the time. There are so many other places outside of HEIs where we can use what we’ve learned during our PhD and ECR time to have a positive impact. For me, this was about a shift in perspective and valuing my skills and passions, not just the specific content of the work. I now think I am doing work that matters. And that feels good. 

Name:

Mark Joseph Walmsley

PhD Title, Location, Date of Award:

“The First Draft of History”: How the Process of News Construction has Influenced our Understanding of the Civil and Gay Rights Movements of the 1960s, University of Leeds, 2016.

Current Role and Brief Description:

Lecturer in the Humanities and Widening Participation Academic Officer at the University of East Anglia (UEA)

Funded as part of UEA’s Action and Participation Plan, my role is a mix of traditional academic functions – such as teaching and fulfilling administrative roles within my department – and elements that are more often carried out by academic related staff involved in Outreach and Student Support. This somewhat unusual role acts as a bridge between various arms of the University with the intention of supporting students across the full life-cycle from those thinking (or not) about University applications in primary and secondary school to those looking for positive graduate outcomes.


Other Roles (if any) post-PhD, not including your current role:

Shortly after submitting my PhD I  started work as a Widening Participation Officer within the Cambridge Admissions Office, primarily responsible for organising the annual Sutton Trust Summer Schools that bring over 500 students to the city for residential academic study.  I then took a new role in the Admissions Office as a Research Analyst for Widening Participation, Evaluation, and Monitoring.  This involved quantitative and qualitative research aimed at improving existing outreach provision at the University of Cambridge and designing a system by which events and programmes could be effectively monitored. 

One example (if relevant) of how you are able to use your PhD skills/expertise in your current role:

Most of my roles have involved bridging the gap between academic departments and other areas of the University.  As a PhD student you also inhabit this strange space between being considered academic staff by some, but not others – especially if, as many of us did, you also worked admin roles during your PhD to keep the roof over your head. This kind of organisational knowledge and familiarity can be useful in spaces where you need to work across University departments.

One piece of job advice you wish you’d had prior to finishing your PhD:

I think I was advised quite well when it came to academic positions, but there was a (quite reasonable) lack of understanding when it came to administrative or academic-related job roles.  For those thinking of that route, my first advice would be to gain useful (paid) experience during your PhD as many of these positions are internally filled.  The second – and one that I’d wish I’d thought of before starting my first full-time academic-related role – would be to make the most of classes and learning on central software such as Microsoft Excel and Access. These skills not only make your more employable, but will also make your life a lot easier when you do start in an administrative role! 

Name:

Michelle Green

​PhD Title, Location, Date of Award:

My PhD topic looked at the depiction of weight loss and size acceptance in North American Fiction, 1976-2013 (University of Nottingham, 2019).

​Current Role and Brief Description:

I am a Research Development Officer at a university, and I support impact, research plans, and digital communications. I help academic researchers plan, deliver, measure and prove that they have shared specialist knowledge with politicians, charities, schools, professionals, the general public, and others. Moreover, I help researchers show how this has contributed to a benefit or change in how things are done.

​I research the impact of research and help academics write the story of civic change. This change can be in law, policy, professional and industry practice, public understanding of issues, and others. But it is usually in at least three of these areas.

Other roles (if any) post PhD, not including your current role:

Prior to my current position, I worked for two years as a Research Assistant for Nottingham Trent University’s in-house fiction press, Trent Editions. Trent Editions is a really interesting and worthwhile publication that publishes new and out-of-circulation radical works from underappreciated writers and neglected groups, like working-class writers such as Ellen Wilkinson, the first woman Labour MP, and socialist landmark texts. In doing so the imprint also showcases the research specialisms of NTU’s English department – it’s a fantastic initiative.

At Trent Editions I had the opportunity to develop some important transferable skills that contributed to my move into research development. This includes contributing to short-term and long-term project plans. For example, I fed into the imprint’s operating plan, built strong relationships with internal and external partners, completed an audit on sales and other data, created a digital and marketing agenda, and drafted a sustainability plan.

​One example (if relevant) of how you are able to use your PhD skills/expertise in your current role:

I have found my academic research background to be hugely valuable for my current role in research development and impact. If I had to boil it down into one key example, I would choose critical thinking and analysis. I assist researchers with their research and public dissemination plans on a day to day basis, and in order to do an excellent job I usually have to have a good understanding of their research and help them to figure out the most worthwhile routes to take in circulating that to publics that need that specialist knowledge. My ability to demonstrate a flexible, insightful intelligence by adjusting to different academics specialisms has been crucial to the value I can bring in their research and impact plans.

My academic background also means I feel confident in asking questions that probe deeper to get different ways of articulating research. This is useful for me in terms of thinking about wider publics, but also provides clarity to the wider teams I work with.

One piece of job advice you wish you'd had prior to finishing your PhD:

Focus less on knowledge and more on skillsets and personal characteristics. Get into the habit of reflecting on the processes and aspects you enjoyed about a project, start to finish. What was a problem you enjoyed solving and how did you go about it? Are you overlooking or under-appreciating other strengths and motivations you have?

I have noticed that the current advice in alt-ac culture is to write various ‘stories of self’ to open minds to different paths. However, I’d say let’s move away from stories of self to stories of skillsets. Let’s stop feeding narratives that what you do is what you are. Instead, think about how your ability to plan long projects, work across teams with various objectives, or build strong working relationships has developed over your life. What high points recur? What new steps can you see ahead? What are you proud of? See good solutions and better working relationships as comparable to research outputs.

And finally, be realistic and draw on the resilience that took you through the PhD process – accept that whatever career track you embark on, you will have to do more training and adapt. People rarely finish doctoral training prepared for all aspects of academia. A move into a different career won’t be the huge ‘re-training’ challenge you might fear.

Thanks to funding from the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) and the US Embassy in London, we are able to move ahead with The Change Up!

This podcast is based around interviews with former PhD candidates in American Studies or affiliated disciplines who have either moved into an 'academic-adjacent' position, or who have moved out of the academy altogether.

We hope that this project will provide readers and listeners with some practical advice on how to develop their careers post-PhD - whether this is through careers outside of academia, or through roles within academia but not as part of the 'professoriate'.

As this series will showcase, doctoral degrees in American Studies (or in subjects related to American Studies) can provide a great basis for other careers. We want to be able to showcase some of the great things people are doing after completing their doctoral work - and, in the process, highlight some potential options for current PhD students or precarious ECR faculty.

At the same time, its important to acknowledge the systemic problems within academia that are seeing increasing numbers of researchers seek careers in other fields, or which are forcing talented early career Americanists out of the profession.