Tag Archives: jobbing historians

Historians, PhDs and Jobs in 2026

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Brodie Waddell

When I last wrote about the employment situation for historians back in 2023, the situation was not looking very bright. It has, however, somehow gotten much worse since then.

This short post is an attempt to share some basic data about the number of PhDs granted per year and the number of historians employed in UK universities, based on the figured published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), which recently released its latest data up to 2024/25.

Before going further, I should note that the University and College Union branch at Queen Mary University of London has been doing the grim but invaluable work of collating reports of job losses across the sector on their UK HE Shrinking page, which includes much more recent evidence than the HESA data. I would also point readers to the Royal Historical Society’s page on Data on the UK Historical Discipline and Profession, which brings together valuable material.

There is now less solid information about the situation in the USA, though everyone will be aware of the terrible circumstances many historians are facing there. In my previous post, I noted that the American Historical Association had stopped publishing their Chart of Doom every year and now it seems they have even stopped issuing an annual Academic Jobs Report, which was last released in 2023.

The HESA data for the UK can be put into a simple spreadsheet and visualised as a chart of total staff employed in History in Higher Education, compared to the number of PhDs in History granted each year.

In 2024/25, there were 3,560 staff employed and 650 students awarded PhDs in History in UK universities.

(Note that the staff figures are for total number of people employed in this area on December 1st. The HESA data on full-time equivalents is more complicated, but for ‘academic (excluding atypical)’ FTE staff in History, the figure is 2,875 in 2024/25.)

All data from HESA. Note that the left axis and right axis are on different scales, so they are comparable in relative but not absolute terms.

In the UK, the HESA data shows a few obvious trends. First, the number of staff in History rose fairly steadily from 2014/15 before peaking in 2019/20 and then mostly falling to the current low in 2024/25, the lowest number for about a decade. Second, the number of PhDs granted in History has bounced around each year since the mid-2010s rather than following a clear trajectory. Finally, the upshot of those two patterns is that the number of current staff per new PhD has reached the worst ratio since at least 2019/20. One PhD was awarded for every 5.5 current History staff in 2024/25.

As with my previous update, I’ll end by simply saying join the union and look out for each other, because the government and our employers aren’t going to.

I have put the raw data into an Excel spreadsheet:

HESA data on History staff and PhDs 04-2026Download

Please link to this blog post to provide context if sharing the chart or data.

Historians, PhDs, and Jobs in 2023

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Brodie Waddell

Amid yet another year of university strikes in the UK, the Higher Education Statistics Agency has released the latest data on staff and degrees granted. A couple of years ago, I used this data to try to get a sense of the job market for historians, so it seems like a good time to use the new figures to provide an update.

First, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the USA, where they are able to provide a more rigorous view of the job market because the American Historical Association tracks job advertisements and provides an annual report. In previous years, the AHA reports had been published with a Chart of Doom which showed the catastrophic collapse of job openings relative to degrees granted:

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded: AHA Jobs Report 2021.

In their most recent report, from August 2022, they decided not to publish the Chart of Doom and instead have presented the information about job openings over a more short-term timescale, with more details about the types of jobs advertised. This is very useful information, though it does elide the massive drop in jobs that happened just before the chart starts in 2016-17. In the most recent year, 2021-22, they show ‘academic job listings did indeed rebound to levels above those seen immediately before the pandemic. This increase is not, however, a sign of renewed vitality but a partial return to the steady but dismal state of faculty job availability in the late 2010s.’ Continue reading →

Jobbing Historians: Tales from the Blarchive

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Brodie Waddell

The world of UK universities has changed dramatically in the ten years since our first post appeared on the Many-Headed Monster, and it feels like the pace of change has recently accelerated.

So, while my co-bloggers are looking back at hangovers, Marxists, plebs and creative histories, I want to indulge in a bit of navel gazing. How has the role of the historian as a job been changing over the last decade? Much of my evidence comes from a sample size of one, but I think the sorts of things we’ve been talking about on the blog over the years give some sense of the wider climate.

I vividly remember my own circumstances in July 2012, when we started the blog, because it was a moment of personal chaos but also optimism. I was finishing up a postdoc and had recently been offered a three-year lectureship at Birkbeck, while at the same time trying to juggle the demands of a new baby. I have no idea why I thought it would be a good time to launch a new project, but I’m glad I did. Meanwhile, things were less chaotic but also less optimistic at the national level. The UK was in the midst of the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, and it was pretty clear that universities were generally going in the wrong direction, most obviously with annual tuition fees rising from £3,000 to £9,000 that very year.

What is intriguing, however, is that there is almost no evidence of this on the Many-Headed Monster. Posts from our first few years touched on lots of different historical topics, but very little on the job itself. That said, Laura’s reflections on conferences as ‘communitas’ and my complaints about boring exam questions are probably a fair reflection of the sort of day-to-day concerns of new lecturers, then and now, even if we somehow avoided mentioning the fact that we were then all currently or recently precariously employed. The closest we came to dealing with our jobs directly was ‘The Future of History from Below’ symposium in 2013, which included reflections on who we were writing for and why, an issue that we would now probably call ‘public history’, but which was barely discussed in academic circles just ten years ago. A couple years later, Laura set out her thinking on ‘What is history for?’ which again highlighted how we were increasingly questioning the purpose of our discipline in the wider world.

Continue reading →

Why do a PhD in History? A look at the data

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Brodie Waddell

Hundreds of people complete a doctorate in History each year at UK universities, a process with huge implications for the strength and sustainably of academic history as a discipline. This figure has been rising gradually but fairly consistently over the past couple decades, from around 250 in the late 1990s, to around 550 in the late 2000s, to a peak of more than 750 in 2016.

PhDs granted in History, 1995-96 to 2017-18

In previous posts, I’ve discussed the job market for History PhDs using various measures including staff/PhD ratios, cohort studies and job listing data. None of the numbers present an especially rosy picture for newly completed PhDs searching for an academic post.

However, in response to each of these posts, readers have rightly asked about the motives of those pursuing doctorates. It is obvious that not all of those 700 or more new PhDs want to become lecturers, so the job market is thus presumably less disastrous than the headline figures imply. But the problem is that it is difficult to know whether this proportion is substantial or negligible.

Thankfully, Andy Burn not only brought it to my attention that there is a UK-wide survey of current PhD students about this, but also very generously turned the raw data into something useable for me. This is the ‘Postgraduate Research Experience Survey’ (PRES) and it asks all sorts of questions, including two about motivations. The highest recent response rate was in the 2017 survey and that’s what I’ve used here, though the proportions were similar in the 2018 survey.

So, what are the results for History? Continue reading →

Historians, PhDs and jobs, 1995/96 to 2017/18

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Brodie Waddell

This is the time of year when many people are applying for PhDs or academic jobs and discussions of the current job market inevitably arise. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts on job listings, doctoral cohorts and staff/student numbers, trying to provide some data to help inform these conversations, but I think it is time for an update. How have things changed since then?

The American Historical Association publishes its notorious chart of doom each year, showing the terrible ratio of new PhDs to advertised jobs, and its most recent version leaves little room for optimism.

Fig 5

AHA Jobs Report 2019

In the UK, we lack a consistent, accessible annual list of academic history jobs. Although nearly all such posts are advertised on jobs.ac.uk, there is no easy way to turn these adverts into an annual figure except by manually monitoring and recording. So, instead, I’ve taken to focusing on the only reliable data that is publicly available: staff and student numbers. Continue reading →

The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England: The Long Road to a New Project

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Brodie Waddell

[Update, April 2019: ‘The Power of Petitioning’ project website is now online.]

How can people without official political power push the authorities to act? Historically, one of the most common tactics was to create a petition or supplication. Even today, every year hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens sign e-petitions addressed to parliament which can lead directly to high-profile debates in the House of Commons.

In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard. Some were mere begging letters scrawled on scraps of paper; others were carefully crafted radical demands signed by thousands and sent to the highest powers in the land. Whatever form they took, they provide a vital source for illuminating the concerns of supposedly ‘powerless’ people and also offer a unique means to map the structures of authority that framed early modern society …

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That was our pitch to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant of over £200,000. To my surprise and delight, they liked it.

So, from January 2019, I’ll be running a project looking at ‘the power of petitioning in seventeenth century England’. The co-investigator is Jason Peacey at UCL and we will hire a full-time postdoctoral research associate for twelve months as well. There will be much more information available once we have the project website up and running, but in the meantime I thought I’d announce it here and explain how it came to be. I hope it might be useful, or at least interesting, to other scholars thinking about their own projects. Continue reading →

Job listings for historians on jobs.ac.uk, 2013-16

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Brodie Waddell

Every year, universities across Britain and beyond place hundreds of advertisements on jobs.ac.uk seeking to appoint historians to academic posts. Although accessing this data is not easy and analysing is far from straightforward, recent listings do provide some potentially useful information about the state of the academic job market for historians.

In my previous posts on jobs, I have focused primarily on the ‘supply side’ of the equation – how many people are completing PhDs each year and how that is changing. It is much more difficult to get hard data on the ‘demand side’ – i.e. jobs available – though I’ve tried various proxies such as the numbers of historians with university posts or the number of incoming history undergraduates. The cohort studies of Warwick and Cambridge PhDs allowed me to link doctorates to academic posts more directly, but that was only a small and probably unrepresentative sample.

New data and methodology

The advertisements on jobs.ac.uk allow us to get a better sense of how many jobs are actually listed in a given year. Continue reading →

History doctorates and the academic job market: 99 Warwick PhDs, 2001-2013

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Brodie Waddell

My analysis of official public data suggests that the number of PhDs in history in the UK is growing significantly almost every year, whereas the number of undergraduates and university-based historians is expanding only very slowly. However, these figures are only really useful for providing a sense of changes in the relative balance between undergrads, teachers and PhDs over time. They do not provide any concrete sense of the likely destinations of successful doctoral candidates.

In September, Rachel Stone, a medievalist at KCL, put together a very useful ‘cohort study’ of the 66 people who had completed PhDs in history at Cambridge in 2005. Her headline result was that 36 of them (55%) seemed to have academic posts a decade later. She also found that modernists and men were more likely to have academic jobs than medievalists and women, though she noted that it is difficult to know which factor is the most influential as women were more likely to be medievalists. Katrina Gulliver did a similar analysis of those granted Cambridge history PhDs in 2007-8 and found that ‘fewer than 50% have a permanent academic job’ after seven years.

I did my PhD at Warwick (completed 2009, awarded 2010), so I thought it might be useful to look at some cohorts there as a comparison. However, as the Warwick History Department is much smaller than Cambridge’s History Faculty, I decided to look at a longer period, namely 2001 to 2013. Continue reading →

Students, PhDs, historians and jobs, 1994-95 to 2014-15

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Brodie Waddell

In September, I posted some data on the state of the field in academic history. It wasn’t an especially rosy picture, but I followed that by trying to gather some suggestions on what could be done to improve the situation and also offered my own thoughts.

My initial post was provoked by my annoyance at how little historical data seemed to be easily available for the history profession, so I pulled figures from HESA and a variety of other sources to try to piece together a picture. A few weeks ago, the American Historical Association updated their job market statistics for US historians and HESA released their UK data for 2014-15, so it seemed only right to update my figures.

Let’s start with the American data as it is much more precisely focused on the academic job market than the UK numbers. Continue reading →

Green Paper Blues: A Shiny New Bureaucracy for University Teaching

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Earlier this month the UK government published its Higher Education Green Paper which sets out its plans for universities. Here John Arnold, Professor of Medieval History at Birkbeck and friend of the Monster, offers his reaction to the new policies and their justifications. This will not be of interest to everyone, but all UK academics and those of you thinking about doctoral studies, who may have read our earlier posts on the state of the field, need to be aware of what is going on. For the uninitiated, ‘TEF’ is Teaching Excellence Framework, ‘REF’ is Research Excellence Framework, and ‘HEFCE’ is the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Gosh, isn’t it exciting finally to see the Government’s Green Paper? Turns out some rumours were true – there will be a TEF, say bye-bye to HEFCE – and others not so much (REF will live on). There’s quite a lot of it to wade through, but – regarding TEF in particular – as one colleague said in a management meeting earlier this week, ‘it’s not actually as bad as all that’.

And of course that’s right. Who could object to ‘putting students at the heart of the system’, and who would not want us to value teaching as well as research? The starting point for TEF is a mild adjustment to something we already do, i.e. institutional audit for quality. So – nothing to worry about here, and perhaps some things to celebrate? Continue reading →