UWM is one of 28 schools to receive National Endowment for the Humanities grants to help prepare doctoral students in the humanities for careers outside academia.
The university will use the $25,000 Next Generation PhD grant to develop new curriculum, bolster faculty mentorship and advising programs, and foster alumni and community support for doctoral programs and students.
“Humanities PhDs are highly trained specialists whose expertise translates well into many kinds of roles that require critical analysis and creative thinking,” said David Clark, associate dean of the Humanities in UWM’s College of Letters & Science. “As a result, for many years they have found employment outside of academia, often in really interesting roles we hadn’t even imagined. This grant will help us work with faculty, past and current students, and partners in the local business and nonprofit communities to make training for non-academic roles a more central and deliberate part of what we do.”
The award is a planning grant that will allow UWM to pinpoint changes to programs during the 2016-’17 school year. Specific measures include evaluating additional courses in scientific and technical communication, exploring new field placements that give practical experience, and creating faculty guides for advising students about non-academic career paths.
“We want to change the culture of Humanities faculty so they think about a broader range of careers, so that they don’t just think about academic employment as the main or desired outcome,” said Jason Puskar, associate chair for English Graduate Studies. Puskar heads the committee administering the grant. “We also want find a way to track our graduates so we know their career outcomes.”
The planning committee includes faculty members and graduate students across several departments in the College of Letters & Science, as well as leaders from the corporate and nonprofit sectors.
UWM’s humanities PhD programs include those in communication, history and English. It has 33 doctoral programs university-wide.
Follow the national conversation on Twitter at #NextGenPhD.
