When Harriet A. Zuckerman joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1991, postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities were rare. If, that is, they existed at all.
At the time, postdocs were unique to the sciences, where they’d already become a standard phase in the life cycles of young scholars. The positions had been created to give newly-minted Ph.D.’s in STEM fields a few additional years of training before they entered the job market by ushering them into laboratories to assist established scientists in their research. Science postdocs were far from perfect—they offered low pay and often-frustrating work conditions—but graduates flocked to the programs.
Fast forward about two decades, and graduates in the humanities are now doing roughly the same thing. Search Vitae’s job bank, or scan the Academic Jobs Wiki’s Humanities and Social Science Postdocs fork, and you’ll hit upon dozens of fellowship opportunities. Pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities, and you’re almost certain to hear plenty of opinions—whether from your own advisors or from other experts—on how postdocs should figure into your job search.