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Teaching & research

Humanities & Social Sciences

Researching a field of ideas or the past, and passing it on.

This suits you if…

You like diagnosing why one particular person hasn't understood, and you are steady enough to manage thirty different states of attention at once, or patient enough for long solitary drafting and the seminars that test it.

Look elsewhere if…

You want pay that matches the responsibility, or you are counting on a permanent university post. School teaching carries a heavier workload than outsiders believe, and humanities departments have been shrinking in many countries, which makes the academic destination genuinely uncertain.

What the work actually is

What the work is actually like

Teaching is performance and preparation in roughly equal measure, plus a large administrative tail: marking, records, meetings, and the pastoral work of noticing which student is struggling. Research is archives, sources, and long solitary drafting, interrupted by the seminars where your argument gets tested by people who know the material as well as you do.

The catch

Two different problems. School teaching is stable and needed everywhere, but the workload is heavier than outsiders believe and the pay is modest for the responsibility. University research posts are the opposite: intellectually free, and structurally scarce. Humanities departments have been shrinking in many countries, so the permanent academic job is a genuinely uncertain destination.

What people get wrong about it

That teaching is explaining things you know. Most of the craft is diagnosing why a particular student hasn't understood, and managing thirty different states of attention at once. Subject knowledge is the entry ticket, not the skill.

The jobs inside this area

  • Historian
  • Sociologist / anthropologist
  • Teacher
  • Archivist / curator
  • University researcher

A list, not a recommendation. You narrow it, we don’t.

What this kind of work usually offers

Helping people · Security · Working with peopleA generalisation about the sphere, not a promise about a salary. Pay and security vary enormously by country and employer.

How you get there

The one-line version

A humanities degree, then a PhD to research. History and essay competitions start it.

Stage by stage

  1. While you are still at school

    Read outside the syllabus and write essays that argue rather than summarise. History and essay competitions are the accessible proving ground, and tutoring younger students is the honest test of whether you like teaching.

  2. What you study

    A humanities or social science degree. For school teaching, a teaching qualification and supervised practice; for research, a master's and then a PhD, which in the humanities is long, solitary and usually less well funded than in the sciences.

  3. How the first years actually go

    Trainee teacher with a mentor and a reduced timetable, or doctoral researcher with teaching duties attached. Both first years are exhausting in the same specific way: you are learning to do publicly something you've only done privately.

Where this work lives, and how you reach it

What you would study for it

Each says what the first year is really made of, and who should study something else instead.

12 countries · 12 cities · 27 institutions named for this field. Each one states its catch as well as its appeal.

  • Kazakhstan

    Named here: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University · KIMEP University

  • Georgia

    Named here: Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University · Free University of Tbilisi

  • Poland

    Named here: University of Warsaw · Jagiellonian University

  • Italy

    Named here: Sapienza University of Rome · University of Bologna

  • Switzerland

    Named here: University of Geneva

  • Netherlands

    Named here: University of Amsterdam · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  • United Kingdom

    Named here: London School of Economics and Political Science · University College London · University of Oxford · University of Cambridge

  • Türkiye

    Named here: Boğaziçi University · Koç University · Bilkent University

  • Japan

    Named here: The University of Tokyo · Kyoto University · Waseda University

  • China

    Named here: Peking University · Fudan University

  • United States

    Named here: Harvard University · Columbia University

  • Canada

    Named here: University of Toronto · McGill University

Without leaving home

1 of the routes that need no visa and no move lead into this field.

Test it this month

Free, and finishable in a few evenings

Teach one 20-minute lesson on something you know to people who don't, and ask them afterwards what they actually took away. The gap between what you said and what landed is the entire profession.