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December 2008
For the past seven years, Kelly Kennington Ph.D. '09 has kept her mind planted firmly in the 1800s. As a doctoral candidate in Duke's history department, she has immersed herself in records from Missouri's St. Louis Circuit Court, where hundreds of slaves sued for their freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Hers is more than an academic interest: Studying slave legal history represents Kennington's awakening about the nation's legacy of racial injustice. "As a child, I wasn't taught much about slavery, and I didn't know the founding fathers owned slaves," says the twenty-nine-year-old white Ohioan, whose studious, meticulous style masks a fierce passion for her subject matter. As an undergraduate at Tulane University, Kennington read Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup's account of being abducted in Washington in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northrup was a free man and an accomplished violinist until his early thirties. Then came his encounter with slave dealer James H. Burch and "lackey" Ebenezer Radburn:
"As soon as these formidable whips appeared, I was seized by both of them, and roughly divested of my clothing. My feet…were fastened to the floor. Drawing me over the bench, face downwards, Radburn placed his heavy foot upon the fetters, between my wrists, holding them painfully to the floor. With the paddle, Burch commenced beating me."
Reading this narrative, with its raw detail, filled Kennington with "a new outrage," she says. "I was really struck by this idea that a person could be free and their status could change just like that—through this act of kidnapping. And this happened to a lot of people. Not everyone was able to escape and return to freedom. All those things really made me want to learn more." She signed up for courses taught by historians Betty Wood, a preeminent scholar of Colonial Era slavery, and Judith Schafer, an expert on slaves and the law. Delving deeper, "I felt a sense of frustration that slavery wasn't talked about in my high-school history classes," she says. "This is an important part of our past that we can't separate from our present. The legacy of our history hangs over us today. We have to be cognizant of that in order to move away from it." Kennington scrapped her plans to attend law school and, after earning her bachelor's in 2002, came to Duke to study African Americans' struggles for freedom in the antebellum South.
But on this warm winter day in Durham, Kennington is firmly back in the present. Fewer than four months away from earning her Ph.D., she is thinking about the challenge every doctoral candidate is pondering right now: how to land a tenure-track teaching post during one of the worst academic job markets in memory.
Under the best of circumstances, finding an assistant-professor job is a harrowing process, as colleges and universities shift toward non-tenure-track and part-time instructors. But the last year has been even worse. The nation's recession has forced many departments to cancel new faculty searches. In addition, fewer older professors are leaving their jobs, says Robert Townsend, assistant director of research and publications at the American Historical Association (AHA). "A lot of faculty members who've looked at their retirement portfolios have said, 'On second thought, let me stay around for a bit longer,' " he explains. Academic job listings for historians are down 20 percent over last year, even though the number of undergraduates majoring in history has reached a thirty-year high.
Other fields are experiencing similarly sagging job markets. The Modern Language Association reports a 25 percent drop in English and contemporary foreign-language positions for newly minted Ph.D.s. Even the sciences, considered more robust than the humanities, have seen a slowdown, according to Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University who studies the careers of scientists and engineers.
Kennington, whose vita bulges with academic honors, has approached this brutal market with a strategy that is both comprehensive and precise. In August 2008, she met with her adviser, professor of history Laura Edwards, to map out her strategy, then wrote seven drafts of a cover letter that she would adapt for each job. She created a complex spreadsheet listing—among other things—deadlines, academic subspecialties, and status updates. She produced writing samples and model syllabi customized for each prospective employer. She lined up three letters of reference, which she placed on the online dossier service Interfolio.com. With this infrastructure in place, Kennington applied for fifty-four tenure-track assistant professorships and ten post-doctoral fellowships.
She knows this might seem like overkill. "Not everyone I know who's on the market this year is applying to that many," she says with typical understatement. "So, yes, I think mine is a little excessive perhaps. I want to make sure I get a job."
So do her mentors. "We have our fingers crossed for Kelly in this job market," says Edwards. "She's extraordinarily good at what she does. Her work has become so ingrained in her life that it is her life." Kennington, who is compact and professional looking, with short brown hair and glasses, doesn't emote very much when talking about her topic, but Edwards says this is often true of the best academic historians. "They're engaged twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but in a way that's quiet," Edwards says. "To me, Kelly's ability to do this all the time speaks volumes."
The early responses to Kennington's applications have been decidedly mixed. By Christmas time, she had already gone on one campus visit to Florida Atlantic University, and, more recently had a telephone interview with Texas Tech University. On the other hand, nine of the fifty-four tenure-track searches have been discontinued for lack of funding. These cancellations are typical of 2008-09, says the AHA's Townsend.
Now Kennington is getting ready for the AHA's annual meeting in New York, which Duke professor John Thompson calls the "meat market for historians looking for their first academic jobs." Kennington has twelve interviews scheduled, compared with a handful apiece for some of her friends. Thompson, who is the history department's director of graduate studies, attributes Kennington's first-round success to "her diligence, her persistence, and her never-flagging enthusiasm." Kennington is, characteristically, more modest.
"Nineteenth-century U.S. history is a much easier field to get a job in than twentieth century," she says, largely because of "supply and demand. But twelve is on the higher side. It's a good problem to have. I've been telling myself that during the last few days as I try not to tear my hair out with nerves and stress." If she does land a job, Kennington says, "I just hope the one that I get doesn't have to cancel."
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