Placement Record
The graduate history office makes job listings available to its students; the director of graduate studies monitors individual job openings in order to match them to those completing their degrees; and the department as whole works vigorously to place its graduates. Experience shows that students can gain a competitive edge in a tight market through intelligent selection of fields of study, a dissertation of high quality, and effective use of grant support, all areas in which faculty are prepared to assist.
Graduate Achievements and Employment
Northern Illinois University History graduates have an excellent employment and achievement record. Doctoral candidates have been awarded fellowships and grants from the International Exchanges and Research Board, the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the Truman Library, the CIEE Summer Russian Language Program, the Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Bourse Chateaubriand, Bourse Jeanne Marandon and the Newberry Library. After graduation they have continued to lead active professional lives. Collectively, our graduates have published more than a dozen books and a hundred scholarly articles.
One of our first Ph.D. recipients became President of the University of South Dakota and then of the University of St. Thomas (Houston). More recent graduates have held teaching positions at Ohio State (Newark), University of Iowa, College of William and Mary, Emmanuel College, South Carolina State University, Concordia University (Nebraska), Western Illinois University, Westminster College (Pennsylvania), Cleveland State, Grand Valley State University, Benedictine University, the University of Central Oklahoma, Alverno College, and the Illinois Math and Science Academy.
Others teach at Rutgers, Howard, Randolph-Macon, Lake Forest, Iowa State, the University of New Orleans, Elmhurst College (Illinois), Rhode Island College, the University of North Dakota, Kent State, Idaho State, Indiana State, Central Michigan, James Madison, Southwest Texas, Alverno and the University of Washington at Tacoma. Some have found positions outside the United States, teaching in Australia, Canada, and France.
Not all of our Ph.D. recipients are university teachers, however. They also include an economic analyst for the World Bank, a senior editor at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. and the Archivist of the State of Connecticut.
At the master's level, many of our graduates are successful secondary school teachers while others have gone on to major law schools and Ph.D. programs. In addition to continuing at NIU, our master's students are in doctoral programs at the University of Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, Purdue, Duke, and Washington. A number of recent M.A.s have found positions in museums, regional archives and historical societies, including the Chicago Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, the New York State Archives, the Iowa State Historical Society, the Ohio Historical Society, the Museums at Stony Brook, and the Calumet Regional Archives (Indiana).
Some have secured positions as editors, for example on the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and the George C. Marshall Papers, or as research specialists at the Smithsonian Institution.
