In this post, Lewis Wade responds to the first post in the new series ECR in 2025, which you can read here.
I was delighted to be invited to contribute to this series on what it is like to be an ECR in French history at the moment. Like the other ECRs in the series, I was presented with the three questions below and asked to respond as I wished, with the promise of anonymity if I wanted it.
- What is it like being an ECR in our fields right now (in your experience)?
- What can more senior colleagues, institutions, and organisations such as SSFH do to help ECRs?
- What advice would you give to other ECRs or to students considering further study or applying for jobs?
However, as I considered my answer to these questions, I quickly realised that I could not offer full, honest and (hopefully) helpful responses without discussing experiences that would reveal my identity. I am thus waiving my right to anonymity. My contribution to the series comprises three blogposts, addressing each of the three questions. In the process, I engage with the insights of my fellow ECRs in the earlier blogposts, which resonated strongly with me and should be read by anybody who is reading this post.
Before I dive in, allow me to briefly introduce myself. I am a postdoctoral researcher, studying French global commerce during the reign of Louis XIV. Having been the Economic History Society’s Postan Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London in 2022–3, I recently finished a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and I will soon start as a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg in Germany. (All views in these blogposts are my own.) My first book, Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire under Louis XIV, was published with the Boydell Press in 2023.
For me, it is difficult to overstate how challenging it is to be an ECR in French history right now. One fellow ECR speaks of it being ‘cataclysmically bad’; another speaks of the academic job market as a ravaging ‘tornado’; neither are exaggerations.
The academic job market reflects the ongoing crisis in British academia. Prospective lecturers in Britain are competing to secure one of a handful of permanent positions (at most) each year for which they are an appropriate fit. One position advertised this year at a leading university received over 250 applications; it was eventually awarded to a candidate who already had a permanent position at another institution, but presumably could see the way the wind was blowing and (wisely) looked to jump ship before the inevitable wreck in the years to come. Nobody can reasonably fault either the institution or the candidate for this state of affairs, but it demonstrates the cruel intensity of the market right now. Departmental decisions are inevitably shaped by the vagaries of the REF, the implications of which I’ll freely admit I struggle to follow from day to day.
In general, outstanding ECRs with remarkable publication records, strong track records in securing funding, deep teaching experience and varied administrative/organisational experience (conference/workshop organisation, journal/society work, among other things) have the best odds of securing a position, but those odds remain very slim. On my side, I am yet to be shortlisted for a permanent position in the British market. (An interview for a permanent position this year outside Britain sadly did not lead to an offer, which was a tough blow, although I learned a great deal from the experience.) This is certainly not my first rodeo, so I know this is neither personal nor an indictment of my ability as a scholar. I continue to follow the age-old strategy of ‘hanging in there’, applying for postdoctoral positions in the hope that these will buy me the time I need to eventually secure a permanent position.
However, this strategy is coming under great strain: the postdoctoral job market in Britain is becoming increasingly limited. My plans to apply for a Leverhulme fellowship – sketched out in my mind since I started my fellowship at Leiden in 2023 – were promptly curtailed when I discovered the eligibility criteria had been changed for the most recent competition, meaning I could no longer apply. This is part of a broader trend in which British funding bodies are making the definition of an ‘early career researcher’ ever narrower.
The trajectory for ECRs once these schemes are exhausted is not at all clear. Fixed-term lectureships are incredibly hard work, offer little scope for developing one’s publication record, and – so I’ve been told by multiple senior scholars across the British system – carry little weight on the job market. Let me follow my fellow ECRs in acknowledging the elephant in the room: in many instances, fixed-term lectureships are exploitative. Yet once ECRs find themselves squeezed out of the main postdoctoral competitions, it is hard to see how those without familial wealth are expected to ‘hang in there’ for a permanent position without recourse to fixed-term lectureships. Thus, in a cruel twist of irony, ECRs are often pushed into taking these positions, thereby sustaining the systemic scarcity of permanent positions that allows these exploitative lectureships to exist in the first place.
Nobody can say with a straight face that this is a sustainable career path. As a result, the message from British academia right now seems to be, quite simply, that ECRs shouldn’t ‘hang in there’ at all, with all that this will entail for the social makeup of British universities going forwards. As a First-Generation student with a state comprehensive education, I’ve remained defiantly stubborn in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles throughout my life, but I’ve had to accept the sobering reality that I am statistically likely to run out of road in academia sooner or later.
For those who are eligible for Leverhulme or British Academy fellowships, the competition remains fierce. My application for a British Academy fellowship in 2021 was rejected at the first round, with no feedback. My materials for this application became the basis for my Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship proposal, which turned out to be successful. This is not an exceptional story – on the contrary, it will be very familiar to many who read this blogpost. Excellent projects are frequently rejected outright, and candidates are often given no feedback, leaving them unclear as to where to go from there: was the proposal fundamentally unsound, or were they simply unlucky? The answer is essential for deciding future strategy, but candidates have nothing with which to engage in finding that answer. This can be a problem even for more specialist postdoctoral schemes: during my time on the job market this year, I applied for several such positions for which I was very well suited, but I was rejected outright at every stage. Thankfully, I had a strong contingent of senior scholars around me to reassure me that my proposals were more than good enough: I just needed to keep applying.
And so I did. Even so, outright rejections came one after another. If my Humboldt fellowship application had also been unsuccessful, I would be writing these blogposts right now with no job lined up. I know there will be ECRs reading this who find themselves in exactly that position, and I hope they know that I keenly feel their anxiety and their indignation (because, yes, we are right to feel indignant in the face of this job market). Job insecurity shreds productivity, both through the time and effort required to apply for jobs and the impact of such insecurity on mental wellbeing. None of this will be news to anybody with recent market experience, or who is supporting ECRs on the market, but it needs to be said out loud in any case.
I have been more fortunate than many, and I’ve done my utmost to make the most of the support I’ve received. In the three years of postdoctoral time I’ve had to date, I’ve managed to publish my first book and lay the foundations for two more books, one of which I hope to finish during my time in Germany. I love my research, and senior scholars around me are very excited by what I am finding – in short, I know I am as well positioned as I can be, and I will continue to make the most of the opportunities that have come my way.
Yet while I will remain an ECR in the eyes of many by the time my Humboldt fellowship ends in December 2027 – after all, I only defended my thesis in mid-2021 – even fewer avenues for further postdoctoral positions will be available to me in Britain, and there is little reason to believe the permanent job market will be any more auspicious.
In short, the job market is a nightmare right now. This is the unavoidable reality. In the coming posts, I hope to offer some thoughts on how the French history community as a whole can make this experience more bearable.
Lewis Wade is an incoming Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg.
