Launch Your Literary Career
Career Support Resources
Professional Development & Publishing Funding for PhDs
PhD Candidates in Harvard's English Department are invited to apply for Professional Development & Publishing Funding. This funding will allow PhD candidates to replace one section of teaching with an internship or professional development project for one semester, while still maintaining their full Harvard salary. Students are also welcome to apply for this funding on top of their full teaching assignment, if they wish to take on an internship while still TFing two sections.
Professional Development Mentors
The Literary Careers team is excited to introduce our first class of Professional Development Mentors! Our Mentors are students who received Summer Professional Development Awards in Summer 2022. Many will speak at our inaugural Professional Development Symposium, and all will work with the LC team to help us develop new career support resources. In October 2022, each Mentor will publish a personal essay about their career interests and professional development on the English Department's website. Please see our Mentorship page for more information.
Summer Professional Development Awards
Our Summer Professional Development Awards support students' internships and professional development projects. In Summer 2022, Literary Careers awarded this funding to nineteen students. We will soon notify our 2023 recipients.
Alumni Careers Database
This database contains a growing list of alumni from the English Department's graduate program, their career fields, and contact information for any alumni who have affirmatively told us that they would not mind being contacted by students. Current students and alumni of the English Department will have access to this private resource, which is being developed by Gwen Urdang-Brown. If you want to find a mentor in your field from our graduate alumni network, please reach out to Gwen Urdang-Brown (urdangbr@fas.harvard.edu) or Joani Etskovitz (jetskovitz@g.harvard.edu) for more information.
Alumni Mentorship Events
Each academic year, Literary Careers hosts alumni mentorship events on campus and virtually. All current students and alumni of the Harvard English Department are invited to attend. Please see our Mentorship page for more information.
Professional Development Symposium
Each year, Literary Careers hosts an informal Professional Development Symposium to kick off our year of mentorship events and welcome everyone back to the Barker Center. At this event, we invite undergraduate and graduate students to speak about their summer internships and connect with peers in their fields of interest. We also use this opportunity to introduce each year's class of Professional Development Mentors and share our calendar of alumni and Literary Papers events.
Forthcoming Resources
Career Placement Webpages
We will treat our Careers Database as an outline for a series of Career Placement Webpages. For each career field in our database, we will compose a page of sample resumes, sample cover letters, related classes / skill-building activities, professional contacts, links to apply, guidelines for certification, and annual deadlines for each career field. These pages, like our database, will need to be routinely updated as the job market changes.
Career Advising Teams
As more of the graduate students learn more about different career fields, we will expand our program into a more robust, diverse advising team (of graduate students, professors, and alumni) who in turn, will continue to update our database and webpages. In the long term, we hope to create a corollary to the department’s G-2 Proseminar, Public Humanities Seminars, and Academic Placement Seminar, in which graduate students can gather with regular alumni speakers to discuss their progress in exploring different career fields. We’d like for these Advising Groups to be interdepartmental, eventually involving students from the Business School and Graduate School of Education in addition to other humanities departments.
Motivation
The career prospects of our department’s students are changing. While technological innovations are creating new literary careers, Covid-19, among other factors, has interrupted the academic hiring process for tenure-track positions in the humanities. The department has already recognized these shifts in our panels and classes connecting current students with alumni who have developed successful, intellectually fulfilling careers. The training that we receive in English is marketable and in demand. Every organization needs communicators, scholars, storytellers, writers, designers, and project managers—and there are entire industries that rely primarily on humanities learning, such as curriculum design, EdTech, English teaching, nonprofit work, curating, and publishing. Yet, to equip ourselves for our new professional conditions, our responsibilities as a department have increased.
The Literary Careers Program is designed to help students identify, pursue, and obtain intellectually fulfilling, gainful employment. We will expand the department’s ongoing efforts and offer more practical support: guiding students through the processes of resume and CV building, developing technological skills, and seeking internships early in the PhD. This program is part of our ongoing work to recognize that each student’s work towards developing their career comes with different challenges and degrees of urgency, due to inequities related to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. For younger graduate students in particular, what it means to be a scholar in the twenty-first century has changed.
The Literary Careers Program is seizing this chance to identify, explore, and make space for English Department graduates in an increasing number of career fields that will leverage our training to support intellectually fulfilling lives.