For this new series of collaborative blog posts, early career researchers (ECRs) in French history in the UK were invited to reflect on their recent experiences. In autumn 2025, the situation across UK universities looks increasingly bleak, with more than a hundred separate redundancy schemes or cuts underway by one tally. In this context, the already challenging position of ECR researchers has grown much worse very quickly and perhaps more quickly than other colleagues realise. When so many of us feel powerless in the face of the structural problems facing universities, there is value in sharing experiences and drawing attention to practical things that institutions and senior colleagues can do to help ECRs in our fields. There is value, too, in giving ECRs opportunities to express their frustration in ways that they cannot in conversation with colleagues upon whom they might depend for their next job, reference, or other assistance.
The contributors include men and women, ranging from PhD students to postdocs and come from a range of institutions. None of them are employed on open-ended contracts. Their words have not been edited or blended together, but are presented as anonymised, numbered contributors. The contributors and numbers are not the same in every post.
This post is the first of three, with the next post exploring their suggestions for what colleagues and institutions can do, and the final post offering their advice to current or prospective PhD students in French history. For this post, we asked contributors: what it is like being an ECR in a field like French history right now (Autumn 2025)?
Contributor 1:
What does Early Career even mean as a label?
There is a generation of young scholars who are finding themselves stuck in what feels like a period of protracted adolescence. Early Career used to mean the first couple of years after a PhD while you took on a postdoc, or a research position, while you waited to get a more permanent job. But increasingly it is also being applied to scholars who may have finished their PhDs ten years ago, but have struggled to get a permanent job. The category is getting broader and broader…. But let’s think about the Early Career state of mind.
It’s killing our friendships.
We’re all applying for the same jobs, talking about who is applying for which jobs, who deserves which jobs, and how fed up we are of not having jobs. This conversation is boring, exasperating, and addictive. It brings out our worst anxieties and frustrations, particularly when we repeatedly have it over bottles of wine. This is a great way to associate your friendships with a deep feeling of failure and anger.
It’s killing our romantic lives.
How many relationships have I seen fail because the academic in a couple took a job overseas because they had no other options? That’s without even mentioning the unfortunate academic couples who can spend a decade commuting between different university towns. Even more than that, years of precarity can mean you struggle to invest in your own future. An ex-boyfriend is an early career scholar, a jobbing lecturer at Oxford who has cobbled together a number of part-time roles into one Frankenjob.
The best way to give yourself crippling commitment issues is to find yourself with no actual job security but attached to one institution that you hope will reward your loyalty, praying for your contract to be renewed each year. Good luck allowing yourself to relax enough to think about moving in with your girlfriend, you can’t commit to a housing contract because you don’t know where you’ll be in a year. Also, you’re constantly broke. Good luck getting a mortgage, because your income comes from five different places. And good luck imagining yourself having a family, when you can barely look after yourself.
In France, women can freeze their eggs and have it reimbursed by their sécu, paying just 45 euros a year to keep them frozen. Universities should do the same.
Contributor 2:
It is so cataclysmically bad that I think it is no longer even possible to say that the field is in a state of emergency — it is more accurate to say that the state of emergency has come and gone, and left behind a job market that has effectively completely ceased to be functional in the sense of providing at least a significant percentage of all ECRs with the means of starting a career that allows them to meet their basic human needs and live with a modicum of dignity. Right now, it is perfectly possible, and in fact common, for a young scholar to do everything “perfectly” (pick a research topic that is likely to attract future funding, complete your doctorate at a top university, win scholarships, write a great thesis, publish articles, attend conferences, network successfully etc.) and still not be able to find the kind of job that allows them to start an academic career afterwards.
“Making it” nowadays is no longer about skill or talent or hard work, but rather about (a) vast amounts of luck, (b) having the privilege of significant financial family support to survive economically for several years after completing a 9+ year-long university education while slaving away at the kind of below-minimum-wage stipendiary lectureships or post-doctoral positions that might at some point lead to a more stable position, and (c) being willing and able to uproot your entire life to move to wherever in the country (or, increasingly, in the world) you may be offered a temporary position, often for as little as six to nine months, before having to start all over someplace new. This process is made vastly more complicated, and even less likely to lead to success, for those of us who have caring responsibilities, disabilities, and/or who are dependent on a visa to stay in the UK. The way the field is developing, it seems probable that the few historians who will still be able to have meaningful academic careers in, say, ten years’ time will all be able-bodied, childless British citizens from upper-class families.
Contributor 3:
It is challenging being an ECR on a fixed-term contract right now, especially in such an unfashionable field as Modern European History.
Early Career positions are advertised as aiming to help ECRs develop their CV and make it competitive for permanent/tenure track positions. In practice, however, it appears that departments use ECR positions primarily to fill teaching gaps. Results are problematic in two respects. First, the most obvious problem is that ECRs end up being frequently overloaded with teaching commitments and unable to develop their research. Second, even when the teaching-research balance is respected, hiring ECRs on temporary contracts for teaching Modern European History is inherently hypocritical. Departments refuse to hire historians of Modern Europe on permanent contracts on account that student demand lies elsewhere. At the same time, they keep teaching European History, hire ECRs on fixed-term contracts to do so, claim to be boosting their careers, but fail to provide the permanent positions that should follow.
Contributor 4:
I recall during my PhD seeing a meme template of a man calmly mowing his lawn as an approaching tornado raged in the distance. The man was captioned with ‘me finishing my PhD’, and the tornado with ‘the academic jobs market’. For the graduate student who has embarked on a lengthy and often costly training in something that appears to ultimately offer little more than existential doom, such gallows humour is understandable. I certainly related strongly to it at the time. Yet having braved the tornado for some five years now, I think that the metaphor remains just as applicable to the precarious context of early career research. One might add a few more ornaments to the garden, accumulating experience on various projects, finishing written work, or embarking on new collaborations. But given the tenor of most conversations about UK HE at the moment, tending the garden can appear an increasingly futile or even surreal endeavour. Even stringing together fixed-term contract work means always looking over one’s shoulder at the approaching tornado – in this case unemployment – something I had a short spell of recently. What’s particularly sad in such circumstances is how the future starts to lose any appeal of possibility, hope or excitement, but becomes associated only with the current contract ending, and the need to find a new job. As individuals I don’t think there is always much that can be done in such a context, but recognising that the situation is beyond our control can offer a solace of a sort.
