Career Alternatives for Art Historians

In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“No More Plan B,”‘ October 9, 2011), Anthony Grafton advised faculty who were charged with counseling and training students pursuing graduate study in history not to think of a tenure-track job in academia as the only and ideal future job, but to realize that the prospect of the number of academic jobs and new Ph.D.’s approaching one another in the near future is extremely unlikely. Therefore, students need to be made aware that the skills which they are developing –“doing research; conceptualizing relationships between structure, agency, and culture; combining research and analysis to present arguments with clarity and economy; knowing how to plan and carry out long-term projects” — are all transferable to a wide range of occupations.