A Maverick Candidate’s Message to the AHA: Elect More Adjuncts

A medievalist petitions her way onto the ballot for the American Historical Association’s council.

Emily Rose is no wallflower. She has taught at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere. As a journalist before that, she supervised CNN news production in Tokyo, New York, and Atlanta. But approaching strangers at the January conference of the American Historical Association conference in Washington was nonetheless daunting.

"I went around with a clipboard," she says. "I had to steel myself to do it."

Her goal: to get on the AHA’s ballot. Normally, candidates for the association’s council are picked by a nominating committee. Rose thinks that adjuncts are underrepresented in those nominations.

Rose, an award-winning specialist in Medieval history and the history of early capitalism, has for almost two decades been an adjunct herself, teaching at a half dozen institutions and holding research positions at several others. She wanted to throw her hat into the AHA ring to advocate for contingent faculty.

She had one way to do so: to get on the ballot by petition. That requires 100 signatures. Rose acquired more than 200.

She warmed to the task. "It opened up so many conversations about what people wanted the AHA to be," she says, "their frustrations with it." ...