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Career Resources


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Career and Job Market Information

The MLA regularly produces reports about academic career prospects for graduates of doctoral programs in language and literature. Sources of information for these reports include the MLA's annual analysis of positions advertised in the JIL, the MLA's periodic surveys of PhD placement, and the United States government-sponsored Survey of Earned Doctorates. From time to time, the MLA conducts special studies, such as the 2004 MLA survey of hiring departments, which canvassed departments about the outcome of searches they conducted during the academic year 2003-04.

Report on Trends in the MLA Job Information List, September 2007
Findings from the MLA's Surveys of PhD Placement 
Preprint Release: Report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 
Report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2005 
Report on the MLA's 2004 Survey of Hiring Departments 

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Information and Guidelines for Job Seekers and Hiring Departments


For additional information about the hiring process, see English Showalter et al., The MLA Guide to the Job Search: A Handbook for Departments and for PhDs and PhD Candidates in English and Foreign Languages (rev. 1996). The Guide offers an overview of the job market and contains specific advice for departments on handling each stage of hiring effectively. The Guide is available for $5 from the MLA. To order, go to the MLA Bookstore or contact the member and customer services office (646 576-5161; bookorders@mla.org). You may also fax your order to 646 576-5160.

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ADE and ADFL Online Job Counseling

This site contains advice on career planning and the job market from over seventy authors, most of them senior department chairs with extensive experience in hiring. The advice is organized as responses to commonly asked questions under the categories


In addition, the site contains links to thirty-five articles on the job search from the electronic archives of the ADE Bulletin and the ADFL Bulletin. This service is offered by the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages as a year-round supplement to the individual job counseling that administrators of their member departments offer at the MLA convention every year, 28 and 29 December, in the Interview Area of the Job Information Center. We plan to expand and adapt online job counseling to the needs of its users, so if you have any questions about the job search that are not answered here, please send them to David Laurence at dlaurence@mla.org, and we'll seek a response from a department chair to add to the site. For technical questions concerning the site, please e-mail Stephen Olsen at solsen@mla.org. Finally, we thank our contributors for generously providing the content of this site.

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About PDF Files  

Downloadable documents are in Portable Document Format (PDF). These files can be viewed, saved, and printed in identical form on most computers. Adobe Reader is free software for using PDF files. If it is not installed on your computer, you can download it from Adobe Systems. For those who use screen readers, recent versions of Adobe Reader include text-to-speech and other accessibility functions, and Adobe provides online tools that convert PDF files into HTML or ASCII text.

 

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© 2008 Modern Language Association. Last updated 02/29/2008.