In April, we posed a set of questions: How has the pandemic shaped your work and life so far? What are the main issues you face in the coming months? What questions are you going to need answers to? 

The questions were not particularly unique; since the beginning of the pandemic, similar questions have formed the basis for a number of roundtables and forums on COVID-19 and higher education or museums. But we wanted to hear how historians working off the tenure track, especially those whose employment was already precarious before the pandemic, would answer these questions. These nine historians shared their answers with us—and with you.

Click on each contributor’s name for a stand-alone version of their piece.

Mucsi Márton, “Fear and loathing everywhere” (Wikimedia Commons)

Marta Olmos

My experience in the museum world has been defined by barriers. I have struggled with money while volunteering and doing unpaid internships. Visitors have questioned my knowledge because of my race. I thought that if I worked hard enough, struggled hard enough, I could overcome these barriers. I could climb their jagged walls and find, if not success, at least a paying job. After finishing my MLitt in Scottish history, I was unable to get a job in that country because of my citizenship status. I was too new, too expensive, too politically inconvenient, too risky. So I returned home, only to learn that the risks ran even deeper than I imagined.

As a historical interpreter, my work relies on human connection and hands-on experiences. My body, molded by corsetry and cotton, has been a tool for storytelling and bringing the past to life. Now my body is a weapon. Do I have it? Am I spreading it? I walk lightly through public spaces, covering my face to protect others from my presence. My work is too risky. My stories are non-essential.

The next few months, and possibly my career, hinge on hopeful phone interviews for the few remaining summer internships, always punctuated with a warning: this internship may be canceled because of the virus. My stomach turns in knots while I try to present myself as a safe and qualified candidate. How can I convince a hiring manager to take a risk on a new graduate like me when all our lives have become so overwhelmed with risk? The structural barriers have grown higher, denser. I have already begun taking part-time roles outside the museum industry. My time is running out. And as I pull a mask over my dark skin and curly hair, I can’t help but think that I’m an awfully risky investment. Will anyone be willing to take a risk on me?

Marta Olmos (@almostmartita) is a writer and historical interpreter. She works on late-18th-century social and military history.

Hilary Bogert-Winkler

Pre-COVID, my days were largely divided between work life and home life, and while I was never perfect at separating the two, I had achieved some semblance of balance. Since isolation orders went into effect in March, that balance is completely gone. My life as a mother and as a faculty member and administrator are on top of each other (sometimes literally, given how often the kids want to be on my lap while I work) and the resulting whiplash can be disorienting and even disheartening.

This new abnormal has caused me to pause and ask myself what gives any coherence to my days. Coherence might seem impossible when one minute I’m cleaning up spilled Cheerios and the next minute I’m having a Zoom discussion about how we will teach at the seminary this fall. But as I think through what, if anything, connects these disparate parts of my life, I keep returning to the idea of vocation.

As a faculty member and administrator at a small theological college in Montréal, as well as an ordained Episcopal priest, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking with students about vocation. There are many misconceptions around what the term really means. Many students and laypeople equate vocation with ordination. Many clergy equate it with their job. Many I meet outside of the church, especially in a place like Québec, equate it with being a monk or a nun. I often engage with these people to  expand their definition of vocation—one that is not restricted to the ordained or those who have taken up life as a monastic. Indeed, one does not have to be religious to find the concept of vocation helpful.

What is it, I ask my students, that most excites you about ministry? Where do you find that same excitement outside of the church? In answering those questions, I help my students think through what their underlying vocation might be, and how they are being called to live it out both within and outside of the church. I have long thought that these kinds of questions would be helpful in doctoral programs as we think more broadly about graduate education and its possibilities. What is it that excites you about your research and writing? Where do you find that same excitement outside of the academy? In what ways can you bring those together?

The pandemic has gotten me thinking again about my own vocation as a teacher. Doing so has allowed me to rediscover the ways teaching is present in my life as a parent and professor. There will still be times when the demands to get more crackers and milk will compete with the need to revise an article and send ten more emails. Underneath it all, however, is a deeper sense of my vocation and the new places I have learned to look for it in these extraordinary days.

Hilary Bogert-Winkler (@hilary_bw) is the Director of Pastoral Studies at Montréal Diocesan Theological College. She recently received a PhD in history from the University of Connecticut.

Sarah Stoller

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.

Sarah Stoller (@sstohla) is a writer and historian of women, feminism, and work. She just completed her PhD at UC Berkeley, where she researched the history of working parenthood.

Jeanna Kinnebrew

Perhaps it was an omen that I began my most recent dissertation chapter draft on Friday, March 13.  By Monday, we were hunkered down in quarantine. My son’s preschool closed, my university moved online, and my husband set up an office in our bedroom.

Our household haven’t changed much since then. My son misses his friends, but Mom substitutes as an acceptable playmate. As a computer engineer, my spouse’s job was easily exported to Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. My work, however, has come to a complete standstill.  The two major archival trips I planned for this summer are canceled, and none of the material essential for my research is available online.

Moreover, I took on the role of full-time parent.  Instead of editing chapters or working with the archival materials I do have, I’m cleaning up Goldfish crackers and asking my four-year-old, “Did you use the potty?,” twenty times a day. My world narrowed from an academically and personally engaging one to a day-to-day domestic grind, bookended by morning coffee and an evening glass of wine.

Like so many other households with young children, the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the fissures in our social and economic lives. Having access to childcare during the school year smoothed over the reality that my spouse’s work takes precedence over my scholarship. His career pays far more than my student stipend does, so it made economic sense for me to be the primary parent. Yet as the months of quarantine stretch out, I worry about losing my sense of self as a scholar. Will I ever get back to the archives? Will I finish my dissertation?

I recognize that my household is in an extremely privileged position. We still have income. We’re safe. We’re healthy. Yet I suspect that my experience is one with which many, if not most, parents struggle, especially women. What happens if childcare centers don’t reopen for another six months or a year? As the academic job market continues its downward slide, how much further behind our peers will we be?  What will our opportunities look like in the post-COVID “new normal”? How can we care for our young children and still fulfill our responsibilities as historians? Or is it even possible?

Jeanna Kinnebrew (@teamkinnebrew) is a PhD candidate at Boston University, studying public health and private philanthropy. Prior to graduate school, she worked for over a decade with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.

Emilie Egger

Many graduate students at Yale have babies; the benefits, after all, are exceptional. We’re guaranteed a paid semester of parental leave, health insurance for our child, and a childcare subsidy. Students often speak of the “$200 baby,” referring to the standard hospital bill for a birth—a remarkable deal in a country where the average delivery costs $4,500 with insurance.

As a prospective parent, I felt obligated to make the most of these benefits; but as a scholar of reproduction and eugenics, the insurance package gave me pause. Why so many allowances for having kids? It wasn’t just institutional benevolence, since other parts of the graduate healthcare plan are notoriously ungenerous. I found in myself a primary source: What was the university reproducing through its support of my reproduction? Was it positive eugenics, wherein reproduction by the right people equates to more cultural and material wealth, and therefore worth the investment in an otherwise austere culture? How far did this generosity extend? Would Yale be as liberal if I requested a hysterectomy?¹

Whatever it was, it was far from secure. When the pandemic hit, university administration failed to guarantee how long our health benefits would last and whether they would continue if the university schedule was further disrupted. They told us extending our fellowships in the wake of coronavirus would cost too many millions (a clue that something was amiss, since these are people who deal in billions). We were advised to take out personal loans and exhaust our savings, which would serve as a more reliable “rainy-day fund” than the corporation’s surplus.²

Like the “brick wall” Sara Ahmed invokes in her study of institutional diversity work, Yale’s value system revealed itself, not as a metaphorical obstacle, but as a material barrier, “something real that blocks movement, or that stops a progression.”³ The wall blocked clarity over my reproductive future: whether I would have the material resources to care for my family and the capacity to continue my work. Evidently, reproducing the endowment is more reliable—less disruptive—than investing in students or research. The crisis transformed prospective donors and the creators of prestigious research into mere dependents; more promise was to be found in growing market returns, the proliferation of debt, and fossil fuels.⁴

In pushing against the wall, Yale graduate students have encountered the archives of the university’s reproductive priorities. I’m encouraged by activists’ demands to re-envision care work and rethink what is required to create academic work in the wake of the crisis. We must re-envision the value of humans in the university now that we’re missing their contributions so deeply—now that the wall is both more apprehendable and more vulnerable.

Emilie Egger (@EmilieEliz) is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University, where she studies reproductive politics in Latin America and the United States.

Jonathan Burdick

One of the more surprising revelations from this last school year was that it is not easy to teach a high-school Digital History class digitally.

One might think Digital History would be a natural class to transition to online learning. And I had the added benefit of experience, having taken online history courses as a graduate student. But public high schools are different from graduate school, not least because of the public school codes to which teachers must abide.

When I was originally approved to create the Digital History course, I excitedly designed the curriculum. I typed a fancy syllabus. The class was scheduled for the fourth quarter as an upperclassman elective and I was eager to end our school year with some hands-on, student-directed, collaborative learning. We received a brand-new Apple desktop computer with high-end podcasting equipment, which I envisioned the students would use for oral histories and podcasting projects. We were going to create a community-accessible digital archive of historical photos, newspapers, and documents. We would produce mini-documentaries and a historical walking-tour map for the town. I would facilitate my students in these projects while also teaching them how to utilize the vast digital archives already available online.

None of this happened.

About an hour after the school day ended on Friday, March 13, our governor shut down Pennsylvania’s schools. Though we had anticipated the shutdown, most of us were still unprepared. In a matter of days, we had to take curricula designed for physical classroom spaces and adjust them for online distance learning. For me, this included my seventh-and ninth-grade U.S. History courses.

Cue the challenges. I teach at a rural Rust Belt school, just south of Erie. It is a wonderfully tight-knit town, but one that has devastated in recent decades by fleeing industries. 78% of our students are categorized as “economically disadvantaged.” Many did not have reliable internet access. Fortunately, many school districts (including ours) received grants to purchase internet hot spots, but this took time to orchestrate.

All students must have equal access to any educational opportunities we offer. This is not only the law but a good thing. Still, it was a challenge for districts and teachers to figure out how to teach remotely while adhering to the law. Google Classroom simply cannot replace the classroom.

Also, I miss my students. I miss the collaboration, the conversations, the groans at my corny jokes, the improvisation, the thinking and pivoting on the fly, the sometimes wild process of embracing the tangential and seeing where it takes us, and the performative storytelling that comes with teaching history.

Somehow we did it. It wasn’t always pretty. I’m not sure that I did a good job. I’m not even sure how much learning actually happened, but I did the best that I could and I hope that my students took something away from the last few months. More than anything, I hope that they are doing okay.

Jonathan Burdick (@JonathanBurdick) is a public school teacher in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a contributing writer for the Erie Reader, and he runs the experimental public history project Rust & Dirt.

Hanna Howard

If you had told me on February 27, 2020—the day I packed my books, my cat, and my partner into my car and embarked on a cross-country move—that the world would soon be wracked by a deadly virus, I probably wouldn’t have changed my plans. It was a big move, after all. My partner was starting a new job, and I had a solid lead on one myself, which promised to be a serious step up from the museum gigs I’d worked since earning my MA last year.

On Friday, March 13, I signed an offer for that job—an interpretive manager position at a public-history site I love. Four days later, the site’s offices closed for two weeks and stayed so through May, delaying opening day for the season. Thankfully, my position was safe, but I had to wait to start work until museum leadership decided it was safe to be on site.

While I waited, I thought about how COVID-19 changes historic interpretation in practice. Good public history engages all five senses, but touch is particularly crucial to sites like mine that prioritize participatory visitor experiences. There’s a lot we simply cannot do once we reopen, in the interest of public health.

We can, however, adapt to the changing interests and concerns of the public we serve by finding relevant ways to invite them to participate in the stories we tell. I suspect certain themes within my museum’s pre-existing interpretive framework, like the threat of disease and early mortality or resilience in tight-knit communities, might strike visitors differently this year. If visitors want to talk about the pandemic, topics like these are useful entry points to draw them into the larger historical narratives we want to share. I hope they find thinking about the past helpful in making sense of the present; I know I have.

I recently started my new job after nearly six weeks at home. My first days flew by as I learned names and faces, interpretive material, and new procedures designed to mitigate the spread of the virus when the site opens to the public. This month we finally reopened, in a very different world.

It’s going to be a interesting summer.

Hanna Howard (@hannamhoward) is a public historian based in the Midwest. She holds an MA in public history from North Carolina State University.

Megan Smeznik

My career as a historian has taken many twists and turns in the past five years: countless internships; the realization that a career in museums was not my calling; finding that calling instead in instructional technology. But the COVID-19 pandemic truly has by far entailed the greatest upheaval, uncertainty, and change.

I do not think anything could have prepared me for the realities of COVID-19. My world has gone from daily face-to-face interactions to a constant barrage of video calls, endless requests for tips and support, and struggling meanwhile to manage my own emotional state. Historically, my institution has not offered online courses, so the pandemic has recontextualized much about learning and engagement. It is ironic that my job is all about helping educators with technology and pedagogy but now I find myself at a loss, more exhausted and confused than ever.

When will we return to campus, and what will that look like? For those of us whose job is to support faculty, there are more questions than answers. We are trying to find ways to maintain and foster personal connections even in a remote environment. What does the reimagined humanities classroom look like in a virtual space, especially for those who have never done remote learning in their teaching career? While learning online is not a new idea and many educators have found ways to successfully engage with their students, I do not have a great solution to this yet. A lot still feels confusing and raw.

My role as an Educational Technologist continues to change each day as we move closer to the fall semester. I find myself stepping into a much different and more complex role of supporting my colleagues to have the best possible chance in developing courses that best engage and sustain an ongoing relationship with their students. There is much more that I need to do to ensure my own capacity to support my colleagues.

Megan Smeznik (@dighistwizard) is an Educational Technologist at the College of Wooster who works primarily with the arts and humanities departments. She received her MA in public history from Kent State University with a special interest in digital history.

Liliana Toledo-Guzmán

The COVID-19 pandemic has already transformed the lives of people. However, being a Mexican studying and working in the U.S. has presented additional challenges. Many students and workers went back home. Some just took a domestic flight, or even drove. For international students like me, the decision was not easy. Should I stay in the U.S. or should I go back to Mexico? The question was compounded by the announcement of a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexican government to partially close the border.

My academic concerns seemed to vanish as more personal issues took precedence. Many what-if questions rose at once: What if my parents got sick in Mexico while I am in the U.S.? What if they died and I am not able to travel? (Yes, they might die; this is the first time I write the exact words of one of my biggest fears.) And what if I got sick? How could I manage a disease like this as a foreigner? How much would it cost me if I got sick?

I decided to go back to Mexico immediately, and am in Mexico now. Staying focused under these circumstances has not been easy. I had to spend many hours in front of the computer to grade 90 assignments each week, and participate in online classes that were scheduled for a different time zone. I have done my best to accomplish all my tasks, but I know my academic productivity has fallen.

I have assumed that if I survive, and my beloved ones do, nothing else would matter. I am trying to assist my parents in any task they might need, trying to do whatever errands might expose them to the virus if they did them. My father is in his sixties and diabetic, and my mother is at risk too. Meanwhile, I still have to pay the rent and the utilities for my apartment in Tucson.

Decisions to reopen universities in the fall are based more on financial issues than on compassion and empathy. Indeed, every day I am more certain that if in-person classes will be the only option to continue my graduate career, I will leave my Ph.D. program. I cannot imagine getting back to “normal” very soon or leaving my parents at risk. I am experiencing vulnerability at all levels: professionally, personally, emotionally, and as a migrant. In the forthcoming months, I will have to ponder my priorities in life. Should I stay at home to assist my parents, or should I go back to academic life, even though there are no guarantees of my health security abroad? Is academic life worth such unconditional sacrifices, when at the same time universities are furloughing and freezing positions? Probably not.

Liliana Toledo-Guzmán is a PhD student in history at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on nationalism, identity, and culture in 20th-century Mexico.

1. Key works that shaped my line of questioning were Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
2. Peter Salovey, “Yale in the months ahead,” Yale News, April 21, 2020.
3. Sarah Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Sara Ahmed, “Practical Phenomenology,” feministkilljoys, June 4, 2014.
4. David Dayen, “Yale University under the Spotlight for Its Investment in Puerto Rican Debt,” The Intercept, Feb. 20, 2018; Amy Whyte, “Yale Activists Want Divestment. David Swensen Isn’t Budging,” Institutional Investor, Feb. 21, 2020.