How can a PhD program pivot from a professoriate-apprenticeship system, to one that is mindful of students’ post-grad career goals? This episode completes our three-part series on The Connected PhD, and explores:

The positive effect on professors when their graduate students can prepare for multiple career options.

How speaking one-on-one with students helped one program reexamine what “support” is, and what it needs to be.

The importance of restructuring PhD timelines.

Why the future of humanities PhD programs matters.


Our guest is: Dr. Ulka Anjaria, who teaches and researches South Asian literature and film. She is the author many articles and books, including Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (Temple University Press, 2019); and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema, First Edition (Routledge, 2021). She is a professor of English, and the director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.
Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:


Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, by Zoe Ayers


Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safer and More Connected, by Petra Boynton


The Field Guide to Grad School, by Jessica McCrory Calarco


Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School, by Kimberly McKee and Denise Delgado, eds.


Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year, by Katherine Firth. Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone


Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom, by Katina Rogers


The Field Guide to Grad School podcast

This podcast on protecting your wellbeing in graduate school

This podcast on finding good alt-ac jobs

The Connected PhD Part One

The Connected PhD Part Two


Welcome to the Academic Life, where we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Missed any episodes? You’ll find over 150 of the Academic Life podcast episodes archived and freely available to you on the New Books Network website.
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