2022 April: “The Crisis of Contingency and the Erosion of Research,” Scholarly Work and the Work of Scholarship in an Era of Contingency, OAH Boston

With contingent faculty now making up almost three-quarters of higher education’s academic workforce, the teacher/scholar model has broken down. Most contingent historians engage actively as scholars, but they do so with little support from scholarly institutions. This session examines the impact of the academic workforce’s transformation on historical scholarship. How does contingency shape historians’ research and scholarship? What consequences does this have for the substance and format of historical scholarship in the 21st century? What changes does this transformation demand of colleges and universities, funders, editors, archives, faculty unions, and professional associations to support contingent historians’ excellence in scholarship?