The Two Specialty Ad

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In the comments to the previous post, a jobseeker asked about an academic ad that wants a Renaissance person who's also a creative writer.  Wow, those are different fields. 

I think there are several ways to look at this, none of which is mutually exclusive.

1)  Small departments need to cover a lot of ground with a few people.  If, for example, creative writing is a growing major, then I can imagine they need someone more who can teach creative writing.  And if someone's retiring, it might make sense to combine that field with creative writing.

2)  There's an adjunct they really like, and who will fit their needs in one area, but who also has this rather unique other area, so they're listing both so the adjunct will be very likely to come out on top of a national search.

3)  The department is split on its needs, and trying to cover two disparate areas with one hire because they can't decide which field is more important.

4)  Someone in the department is wedded to one of the fields, and has enough power to get it listed even if other folks in the department aren't really on board.  If that person is on the search committee, then hir chosen field is going to get emphasized.  If not, maybe not.

There are probably other possibilities I haven't thought of.

Here's a thought, though.  People with MFAs or PhDs in creative writing tend to have a fair number of publications.  It's not unusual at all to see someone applying for an assistant professor position with a number (5+) of publications in really fine magazines, and a book or chapbook as well.

But it's pretty uncommon to see someone applying for assistant professor jobs in Renaissance with that many publications or a book already.

I would think that could make the search process complicated.  How do you count a publication in SEL compared to one in Glimmer Train?

Happily, that's someone else's worry!

If I were applying for jobs, I wouldn't apply for that one because I have no experience teaching creative writing and no publications or anything in creative writing.  (Unless you count the blog, in which case, since I'm really a bachelor farmer in Norway, I'm obviously a fine fiction writer!)

But, if I did have a little creative writing in my background, say a minor with a publication or two, a bit of TA experience, I might take a flier.  But I'd be aware that there's very likely to be someone out there with a strong MFA and a PhD in some Renaissance topic, and I wouldn't be in the competition for long.

The difficult thing for applicants, of course, is that you can't retrospectively prepare for that sort of position.  But that's true of a lot of choices we make.  You can't retrospectively prepare to talk a lot about how committed you are to social justice if you've never done diddly squat in that direction.  You can't suddenly claim to be able to teach Old English if you've never taken a course.  The best you can do is try to make reasonable choices and then represent yourself in your letters really well.