Deciphering a “Dappled” Job Market: Investigating Strategies of Success for Job-Seeking English PhDs
In Spring 2026, we received funding from the CCCC Research Initiative Grant and the Weber State University Hemingway New Faculty Grant to study the English academic job market. Marisa Yerace will serve as PI for this study and work with the JETS team to create resources from de-identified findings.
Research goals
The academic job market for English PhDs remains competitive, arduous, and frequently opaque (Sano-Franchini, 2016, documents this emotional labor). Often, job candidates are primarily mentored by faculty many years removed from their first job market run post-PhD. The field of English needs ways to operationalize 1) updating job market mentorship practices with insights from junior scholars’ recent experiences and 2) iterating on the materials in our repertoire for supporting job seekers to ensure they are effective models in the current market context and include consideration of jobs at multiple institution types, then 3) accessibly and consistently delivering that knowledge to job seekers.
Our primary intervention comes in studying current structures within PhD programs for job market preparation versus the advantages of an inter-institutional approach centering recent job-seekers’ advice. For the last two summers (2024 and 2025), we have offered a free professional development series called Jobs in English and Transdisciplinary Studies. Over five sessions with graduate students from our extended network, we talk frankly about the academic job market in English: what the job types are, how to critically read job postings, how to write the common documents required in applications, and how to prepare for interviews. We collect example materials from recent job seekers and analyze them with attendees to demonstrate genre and disciplinary expectations. After each meeting, we post recordings and transcripts online and conducted feedback surveys to assess how we covered each topic. The advantage of this group comes in leadership from pre-tenure faculty with recent job market experience. Our second year of JETS had over 110 sign-ups from English graduate students across the US. This demonstrates a general anxiety for English PhDs when it comes to the academic job market; it also indicates a desire for up-to-date mentorship on the job market beyond what is already built into many graduate programs.
Academia has a pipeline problem: a study from Wapman et al. (2022) found that 80% of faculty members trained in the US came from 20% of the nation’s universities. At the same time, market preparation is usually heavily focused on jobs at Research 1 (R1) schools, despite R1 jobs only representing a small share of available positions (Leverenz, 2024). JETS is an attempt to address that problem by extending an invitation across institutions and by centering recent job-seeking experiences—some of which resulted in teaching-intensive placements not represented by many PhD mentors.
JETS’s aim is to contribute to the discipline’s mentoring practices via public scholarship—such as our website’s repository of resources—and circulation of our findings and resources through more formal disciplinary routes.
We developed JETS to acknowledge and support the ways graduate student populations and professional goals are changing, while adapting that support to evolving hiring practices and patterns in the discipline. Our research questions are:
- How effective do English Studies graduate students find the job market preparation and mentorship they receive in their graduate programs?
- How helpful/accurate is the job market preparation advice given by JETS, based on attendees’ recent job market experiences?
- What methods can faculty mentors use to effectively support and prepare job seekers in their graduate programs?
Participation
This study is for participants who:
- Completed their PhDs in English or a related field, 2024 or later; and
- Applied to academic jobs in the 2024-2025 and/or the 2025-2026 job market cycle.
Examples of related fields are technical communication, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and second language studies.
Participation in this study means completing one interview of approximately 30-60 minutes. Participants will receive a $25 gift card for participating in this interview. Participants will also have the option to submit job materials to the study for an additional $25 gift card.
Sign up
To sign up for this study, please follow this link: https://weber.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eKChLtMlm0Vy9oO. Our research team will determine your eligibility and follow up soon!
Questions about this study can be directed to Marisa Yerace at myerace@weber.edu.
You can view our conversation guide below.