So You Want a Ph.D. in Digital Humanities, Digital Studies, New Media, Electronic Literature . . .

I occasionally get asked where one should go for a Ph.D. in one of the above fields. I thought I’d offer up a general response to that question here. Please understand that this information is very subjective and far from comprehensive; if you feel there’s a program I’ve neglected don’t hesitate to make mention of it in the comments below (at least until I have to close them because of spam UPDATE: I have had to close them; feel free to email me with comments and I will post them here manually). My remarks are also heavily biased toward opportunities in the United States since that is the academic community I know best. And they are heavily biased towards literary studies, as opposed to other humanities disciplines.

The problem is this: if you want to teach Victorian literature at the university level, the path to doing so, while not easy, is straightforward: you go to a Ph.D.-granting university English department, take a doctorate, and apply for suitable jobs in other university English departments. But because all of the various fields and subfields in the digital humanities are so new and by definition interdisciplinary there’s no one equivalent path to the appropriate credentials. I did my Ph.D. in a large, traditional English department that happened to have several faculty members and a number of institutional resources devoted to the field. That’s one model, and it’s viable in a number of places around the country.

As of this writing, the following English departments are all good places to be. All of them include one or more faculty working at a very high level in some aspect of the digital humanities, in addition to institutional resources in the form of centers, institutes, programming, etc. In no particular order then:

• Maryland
  
• UCSB
  
• UCLA
  
• Nebraska
  
• Virginia
  
• Florida
  
• Iowa

Plus there’s an awful lot of digital humanities happening up in Canada these days: McMaster, Alberta, Victoria, Waterloo, Toronto, and New Brunswick are all places to look at. To the best of my knowledge none of them offer a doctorate in the digital humanities as such, but all of them have faculty working in these areas and centers or other resources. (In the U.K., King’s College London has a Master’s in Digital Humanities.) Write to me if you like and I’ll suggest who you can contact at a particular school.

If you get a doctorate in English literature then you’ll be able to work in any English department that wants to hire someone with your expertise. That’s the advantage of a Ph.D. in a traditional field. I’m also aware of a couple of places that offer a doctorate in aspects of the digital humanities. They are:

• Georgia Tech, Digital Media Ph.D.
  
• University of Central Florida, Texts and Technology Ph.D.

Many humanities departments may be nervous about hiring people with new-fangled interdisciplinary degrees. That’s not intended as an absolute red flag, but before you enroll in a brand-new Ph.D. program in a field that didn’t exist ten years ago you should ask for some straight talk about the program’s placement strategy.

The disadvantage to doing your doctorate in a traditional field like English is that even at the institutions I’ve listed above you still won’t be in a program that’s fully tailored to your needs. You will likely have to complete coursework, perhaps even take qualifying exams or meet other requirements, in something besides your core interests. Here at Maryland many students combine a concentration in digital humanities with a literary period, for example 20th Century American literature. I started out as an Americanist myself and did most of my coursework in that before switching full time to digital media. This actually proved to be an asset on the job market. Ideally you will find a program where there are enough faculty who have interests close to your own that you can bounce from one of their seminars to another. And once you get to the dissertation stage you can essentially do whatever you like so long as you can assemble a committee who is willing to read your work. By the way, never go to a particular program because of the presence of any one single individual on the faculty: people go on leave or take fellowships, change jobs, and get hit by buses. Or else you might find you two simply don’t get along. Always think about whether there’s enough in a program to support your work should any one faculty member disappear tomorrow.

While the credentials path to teaching in the digital humanities is not yet as straightforward as that for Victorian literature (and may not be for a while), the general advice is still the same: think about the people you admire in the field, find out where they are, look at what their graduate programs have to offer, see if you can get a sense of whether they’re an isolated maverick or if they’re at a place where there’s a critical mass of institutional support for the field, cross index this information with your own personal, financial, and geographic variables, and try to arrive at some options. Find out about funding, teaching (will you be able to get a teaching assistanship in your field?), fellowship support, and placement records. Try to get an inside scoop on what individuals are like to actually work with (often the best way to do this is to talk to graduate students who are currently in that program). Is so-and-so already swamped with dissertations to supervise (maybe not a good sign). Does so-and-so not have any dissertations to supervise (also maybe not a good sign). Common sense and a little backchannel checking will go a long way here. Finally, if at all possible, visit any place you’re serious about attending before accepting their offer. Good luck!

Update: Stéfan Sinclair add somes suggestions.