Humanities in Crisis: A Study of 65 Years of AmericanDissertation Trends

Josiah Ober, Rachel Georg and Kirill Kalinin:

After conducting an extensive literature review on the nature, causes, and ramifications of the crisis, our team decided to use natural language processing to analyze the terminology employed in American PhD dissertations in the humanities and social sciences, written between 1960 and 2025. Our premise was that PhD dissertations, written within a given field at a given time, provide a uniquely clear window into the language and underlying conceptual assumptions dominant in that field at that time. This is because dissertation writers, seeking approval and certification by committees of senior disciplinary scholars, must be acutely attentive to what they perceive to be the terminological and conceptual norms of their chosen discipline. Our hope was that using computational methods to track changes over time in dissertation terminology, and the valuation of certain terms, based on the verbal context in which those terms were deployed, would reveal patterns that bear on the questions that the AASL Committee was charged with investigating. This report, jointly written by Ober, George, and Kalinin, is the result of our work.