This is part of a roundtable on the COVID-19 pandemic and the work of history.
On April 1—seven years into my grad program at Berkeley, seven months into my pregnancy, and three weeks into the statewide lockdown—I filed my dissertation. They have a little ritual at Berkeley: when you hand over your final paperwork, you are handed back a lollipop. But this year the notoriously anti-climactic lollipop was out of reach. I whined to a friend, who soon surprised me with an entire bag of lollipops. They arrived, as is now the custom, via Amazon.
Over the past two years, in the face of an ever-less hopeful academic job market, I have prepared myself for the likelihood of leaving academic work behind. Early this spring I signed a contract to work with a history consulting firm on a project with a Bay Area tech company interested in documenting its history. I hoped that this well-paid part-time work would allow me to navigate the professional transition away from academia, as well as my transition into motherhood. But the spring of 2020 has proven to be a difficult time for transition. By April it was apparent that the consulting project would be postponed, likely indefinitely.
Students completing their PhDs this year face not only a bleak academic job market, but poor employment prospects overall. Yet only in the last few years have history departments begun to consider the value of “career diversity.” It has been an uphill battle to convince grad students and faculty alike that it is possible, or even desirable, to look for intellectual life outside of higher education. Now the matter of how and where to pursue the life of the mind is ever more secondary to the question of how we will afford to support ourselves and our families. It remains to be seen how humanities departments will respond to the challenge of even greater numbers of un- and under-employed alumni.
I have found an odd resonance between late pregnancy and the lockdown: a suspended reality, full of expectant uncertainty. And it is in those spaces of uncertainty that the intellectual life primarily resides—not in institutions, as they would have us believe. As we navigate the challenges of finding work and caring for our families, we will rightly turn our intellectual energies to the matters of groceries, haircuts, and how to support our friends and communities at a distance.
Just now, an email from Berkeley’s grad division: they want my mailing address. They’re sending me, and all the other new PhDs, a lollipop.