Faculty of Art
I don’t really have time to read for pleasure anymore and don’t worry, I would never try to add more recommendations to your endless list of content to get to one day (or never at all)… but here are some books we have been reading at the Arts Amplifier which might help orient you, especially if you are a newer graduate student, to the culture of doing humanities/social sciences work in a North American university—whether it’s the historical/social context you’re coming into or standards and style of the type of work you’re expected to produce.
What Heidi’s reading: Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (2021)
An editor I used to work for assigned this book to me to understand her approach to academic editing. Nothing compares to hands-on experience when it comes to learning the craft of writing and revision, but reading this book came pretty close. Williams explains why all my academic sentences sound lifeless, convoluted, and plodding, what to do about it, and then gives me the choice to do nothing about it, for style’s sake (I appreciate craft books that ditch dogmatism for informed decisions). If you’re interested in public-facing writing, or any writing that can maintain complexity without losing the plot, Style is an excellent place to start.
On Carolyn’s shelf: Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (2021)
I’ve been dipping in and out of this book over the past few weeks. In addition to offering case studies of different models of expansive and outward-focused PhD programs (such a huge range!), the book details a history of the American PhD (mostly in the social sciences and the humanities) as a degree that for years has been viewed by some as a one that “should not merely critique social realities but should likewise constitute them” (14). 
There’s a lot in this book to ponder and weigh, but I keep coming back to this view that graduate education in the humanities and social sciences can and should do more than generate critique. It resonates with another quote I read recently elsewhere by an anonymous PhD holder who participated in a focus group on the experiences of PhDs who had pursued non-academic career paths. I’m not going to be able to paraphrase it exactly, but the prompt was something like “what advice would you give to current PhD students” and this person had offered, “try to avoid making criticism a default reaction.” This advice has really stuck with me because it describes so fully what I feel I learned as a graduate student, and one of the things that’s been hardest for me to unlearn. Don’t get me wrong, I know (and Cassuto and Weisbuch know) we need criticism, and there’s lots (and lots!) that warrants critique, but it’s also great to read through a book and just be excited by all the excellent people out there doing visionary and important work.
Ying’s pick: Karen Kelsky, The Professor Is In (2015)
I hear this is somewhat of a classic now, but I only first came across this book during the compulsory professionalization seminar for MAs in my department my first year here. 
We were assigned a couple excerpts as a part of our week on “Considering the PhD and Beyond,” when we learned that as we were just stepping into the ivory tower, countless others who have come before us have already been trying (or struggling desperately) to exit and here was a book that could help us survive. While it was very much one big hard-to-swallow pill as a one trimester old MA fetus, I can understand now that our professor was just doing us a kindness, of showing the particularly naive and idealistic of us the nasty bits of academia that we might never have thought to familiarize ourselves with until it would feel like we were inescapably doomed.
Kelsky recently announced that a second edition will be coming out this year (ten years after the first!), so keep an eye out! Things have only been getting worse, but who doesn’t love indulging in a horror story reflecting our own personal experiences. Not to sneakily tack on another recommendation, but if you would like even more historical context for why everything kind of sucks right now, I was introduced to Bill Readings 1997 text The University In Ruins from the syllabus of another kind-hearted professor which helped make a lot of my complaints about the Arts graduate student experience more credible.
If you get around to any of these, let us know what you think!
Written by Ying Han, Master’s student in Asian Studies, Curriculum Development and Communications Assistant at the Arts Amplifier.
Published 24 February 2025.