East Asia-related Job Market Data Report (2019-2020)

Published May 1, 2020

This page compiles information and visualizations on academic-oriented job postings related to East Asia and Japan for the 2019-2020 season (from roughly August to April).

The ongoing state of crisis in academia over the last decade has fostered numerous conversations among academic circles and publications about the viability of continuing to graduate a high volume of PhDs within institutional environments that offer fewer and fewer tenure-track positions. From these despairing depths, incredibly valuable dialogues have been born on what it means to “go alt-ac” or “academic adjacent” and the cost of short- and long-term contingent positions on career and life stability, mental health, teaching, research practices, and the larger academic profession.

Amidst these questions, some have tried to find silver linings; Inside Higher Ed, for example, declared that the job market for historians was stabilizing, while the image of what “stable” looks like continues to be bleak:

Everyone wants to know, of course, what this means for their own field of study. In East Asian Studies, and especially from the perspective of Japan Studies, there has been much interest in how the field has changed from its earliest days under postwar and Cold War politics, through the “Cool Japan” boom, and into our current circumstances with the balance of hard and soft power shifting yet again in East Asia. At the 2019 Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the “Death of Japanese Studies” panel began a conversation about the issues currently facing Japan-related scholars and educators. In anticipation of continuing this dialogue through The “Rebirth” of Japanese Studies roundtable I organized for AAS 2020 (now converted to a virtual format), I compiled the data on East Asia- and Japan-related job postings provided on this page. I organized data into seven categories: Location, Desired Region, Desired Discipline, Period, Track, School Type, and Public/Private. Within each category, I created a labeling system for visualization.

The academic job market will be even more challenging and unpredictable in the coming years, as many institutions have announced hiring freezes while they attempt to recover from the financial aftermath of COVID-19. I hope that the information provided on this page and the virtual roundtable will facilitate further dialogue on current and future developments in the Japan and East Asian Studies fields.

About the Data: Sources

The data gathered for this exploration originated from several sites:

This data should NOT be considered 100% comprehensive (see caveats below), merely reflective of information provided on some of the most commonly-used job search portals for academic postings related to East Asia.1

About the Data: Caveats

First, let me say that data is messy. This is a reflection on the job ads themselves, which are even messier. A job ad might ask for something fairly specific, like a historian of contemporary China focusing on the environmental humanities, or simply list “East Asian Studies” with no additional information on a desired time period, specialization, or other qualifications. Because job ads are inconsistent in the terminology used to describe some academic positions, I have chosen not to do a vocabulary-based comparison on desired disciplinary expertise. For the purposes of producing this dataset, job ad language was taken at face value, and cannot account for any internal criteria that informed the scope of searches. How data is represented is also interpreted through the compiler. Others might have organized or categorized this data differently than I have.

The data presented here is also reflective of both an English-language and North American bias, as many of the sites examined tend to focus on those positions, and others presented in other languages are only infrequently submitted to these venues. Some postings also may pass through informal channels only or through alternative lists to which I do not have access. Furthermore, some schools either do not or cannot afford to post their job openings through more widely-known channels.

This list also may not be exhaustive with regards to jobs that one might consider “alt-ac” or “academic adjacent,” as I focused to the best of my ability on those ads that readily circulated among Asian Studies circles. In some cases, job postings may have been removed after their deadline passed or when the position was filled, leading to the disappearance of more specific information on their content. I incorporated advertisements posted between June 1, 2019 and April 29, 2020. Data was collected throughout spring 2020.2

Please note that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, some institutions cut their hiring seasons short in March 2020.

About the Data: Cleaning and Organization

In an effort to produce meaningful visualizations comparing different job ads, I created seven different data categories. To review what each category and its accompanying labels mean (and how they were determined), click each of the tabs below.

• Location
• Desired Region
• Desired Discipline
• Period
• Track
• School Type
• Public/Private

The Data

Please review the caveats and labeling system provided above before viewing the data in order to best understand how and why it has been cleaned and organized as presented below. Due to the temporary nature of job ads circulated online, particularly on platforms that delete completed postings or do not provide access to their posts after a certain number of months, I have chosen not to attempt a comparison with last year’s job season, as it may be highly inaccurate.

Below, I have created numerous (though not necessarily exhaustive) visualizations based on my data using Tableau Public. Please note that postdocs were counted by the number of positions offered at a single university. For example, Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies hires four postdocs per year, so this is counted as four positions.

The following visualization is an interactive map of all East Asia-related job postings by discipline, track, and location. Clicking on information in the upper portion of the visualization or on the map below will generate its linked data across other fields. Hover over data points on the map to reveal information on the data point provided. Zooming in or out is also possible. Points on the map are sized to frequency, so a place with more jobs postings will appear larger than other points. Click the title of the subcategory you’re filtering or white space on within the area of the visualization you originally selected to void your selection and start over. Tableau Public can be finicky, so it may take a little experimentation. If interactive visualizations lag or generate an error, please refresh the page.

Note: Two errors have been identified since this page's publication that provide an apt example of the perils of data compilation: "Turkey" has been mistakenly identified as "Istanbul" in the locations list, and Hampden, Sydney College is listed as in Australia, although its geolocation data appears correctly in the map, locating it in Virginia, United States.

Considering all jobs, including those that do not necessarily fall into primarily academic fields, expertise in China was the leading area of interest, followed by Japan and East Asia or Asia in general.

The visualizations below provide a selection of comparative perspectives across regional and disciplinary specialization, with a focus on Northeast Asia, the humanities, and language.

The visualizations above do not include ads seeking specialization in multiple regions. The data includes institutions across the globe. China-related job ads were most prevalent in general East Asian or Asian Studies fields (concentrated on postdoctoral research positions) and followed by language positions and literature & culture-focused jobs. Interest in literature & culture was significantly higher for Japan-related job ads, followed by language. Korean Studies, which has been growing in recent years, shows an increased interest in offering students Korean language.

As a historian of Japan, I found it surprising that only three institutions (University of Leiden, Hiroshima University, and Pacific University) advertised explicitly Japan-focused jobs in History, though the two TT positions were outside of the US. No tenure-track faculty jobs in exclusively Japanese history were offered in North America for the 2019-2020 season.3

The above visualization combines both generalist East Asian/Asian Studies positions and Literature & Culture positions, as these frequently overlap in job advertisements. In this area, worldwide the demand for Japan specialists outstripped China in tenure-track positions, and Korean Studies shows a growing interest in the area of culture and literature. Although Korean History had only 1 TT job ad, culture/literature had 7 TT job ads. For a chart of East Asia-related job ads of this kind specifically in North America, see the visualization I created for Melinda Landeck’s roundtable statement.

Among jobs advertisements world-wide, Chinese language was in the highest demand for the 2019-2020 season. Contingent language positions were more than triple the number of available tenure-track positions.

As for the desired time period of specialization in job ads, modern positions or positions with no stated preference dominated the 2019-2020 season across all disciplinary categories. This trend remained true regardless of tenure- or non-tenure-track jobs. For a more in-depth examination of trends based on time period of specialization, see this page.

R1 (very high research) institutions offered the most jobs for the 2019-2020 season, although this is not always the case. Filtering for US results, for example, shows that while R1 institutions offered the same number of TT (44) and non-TT positions (44) the number small liberal arts colleges offering non-TT positions (26) were double that of TT (13), which in some cases may suggest positions were being temporarily filled while seeking approval for tenure-track lines in the following year.

Overall, job advertisements for public institutions and private institutions were roughly equal. In the US, where the most jobs were advertised, private institutions exceeded public institutions.

As stated above, the ephemeral nature of job ads makes it difficult to create any meaningful comparison across job seasons, as there is no guarantee that reliable data survives for the 2018-2019 season or earlier. However, as these visualizations have shown, it is possible to compare various parameters of the 2019-2020 data with the abovementioned caveats in mind.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on hiring at educational institutions, the impact of which is already being felt as job searches have been postponed or cancelled and hiring freezes implemented for the next 1-2 years (if not more). Where this will leave prospective candidates in the coming years is uncertain, and comparisons of the trends above with future data will need to take these dramatic changes into account. Nevertheless, I hope that the above information will be instructive of the particular moment in time it represents. I encourage readers to review comments by panelists on the state of the field submitted to the virtual roundtable The “Rebirth” of Japanese Studies and reflect with colleagues on these and future paths in the Japan Studies and East Asian Studies fields.

To cite this page:

Curtis, Paula R. "East Asia-related Job Market Data Report (2019-2020)," prcurtis.com, May 1, 2020; http://prcurtis.com/projects/jobs2020/