Patricia Appelbaum
Ph.D. in religious studies, Boston U., 2001
Why she became an independent scholar: She finished her Ph.D. when she was 47, after working for many years as a librarian. She would like an academic job as a research scholar and has looked for such a position, off and on, since earning her doctorate. But her search has been limited by the fact that she must be able to commute from her home in Amherst, Mass.
Why she created a group to support independent scholars: Last summer Ms. Appelbaum started Hidden Scholars, a group for academics without institutional affiliations. She modeled the organization on one she knows that supports people who do freelance technical writing. “This is a region of the country that attracts people who want to live this kind of life,” she says. “We have the Five Colleges, so we have guest lectures, cultural activities, libraries, and colleagues.”
The group meets about once a month, as much to provide opportunities to socialize as to talk about issues. It has attracted about 20 independent scholars in the first few months, with degrees in physics, biology, linguistics, philosophy, Slavic studies, American literature, and theology.
How she supports herself: Ms. Appelbaum does adjunct teaching at colleges in western Massachusetts, including courses on the history of world religions and the history of Christianity. But she teaches primarily in the summertime, so she can devote the rest of the year to her research and writing. Teaching allows her to be “in touch with the profession,” she says, but “my primary interest is to do scholarship.” Her husband is a retired professor. “I would not be able to do this if we were dependent on my income.”
Highlights of her work: Her first book, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture Between World War I and the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press), came out in 2009. She has a contract with the North Carolina press for a book about how non-Catholics have appropriated St. Francis of Assisi. Ms. Appelbaum studies the intersection between religion and American culture.
Daniel Bullen
Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature, New York U., 2003
Why he became an independent scholar: He applied for 30 tenure-track jobs after earning his Ph.D. but didn’t get any interviews. “I hadn’t made myself very marketable right from the beginning,” he says. “I was at a race, class, culture kind of university, but I was focusing on the environment in Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Really I wanted to write, and I got into a few creative-writing M.F.A. programs, but didn’t get enough funding anywhere.”
Besides, he isn’t sure a traditional university job would suit him. “Tenure is like the mythical last bastion of being taken care of all the way to death in our culture, but people make so many compromises to get it,” he says. “Obviously I’m making sacrifices to survive as a freelancer, but I have time to write, and the work is getting done. It’s just slow.”
Where he wants his career to go from here: Mr. Bullen is working on poems and short stories, in addition to a book about myths and rites of passage in modern film and literature. “I’m trying to put together enough publications in the next 10 years that universities will start asking me to be a guest lecturer,” he says. “But it’s hard to find positions that leave you time for writing.”
How he supports himself: Mr. Bullen scores exams for the Collegiate Learning Assessment and works as a freelance technical writer, compiling courseware for professional-certification courses in the high-technology industry. He earns about $30,000 a year. “I’m working as little as possible, making just as much money as I need, and putting all my time into the writing.”
Highlights of his work: Mr. Bullen has published two books, The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy (Counterpoint Press, 2011) and The Dangers of Passion: The Transcendental Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller (Levellers Press, 2012). The Facebook pages he has created for the books have more than 2,000 followers between them.
Kirsten Delegard
Ph.D. in American and women’s history, Duke U., 2000
Why she became an independent scholar: By the time she earned her Ph.D., her husband had established his career as a newspaper editor, and Ms. Delegard had recently given birth to their first child. “Those two things forced me to rethink the traditional academic tenure-track path,” she says. “I saw all these adjuncts working for very little money and spinning their wheels, so I thought, ‘I’m going to concentrate on writing and research instead.’”
What she doesn’t like: “My main frustration is when people condescend to me like I’m not a real academic. There is still this idea, and it’s crazy, that the only real scholars are those who have tenure-track jobs.”
What her Ph.D. adviser says: Nancy A. Hewitt, a history professor at Rutgers University, didn’t try to talk Ms. Delegard out of her career choice and believes that she has made important contributions to the field, including by advancing how people think about women’s activism in American history.
“I would hear the most from colleagues who had known her: ‘Isn’t it a shame that Kirsten’s never going to really be a historian?’” Ms. Hewitt says. “I think it was especially hard for women of my generation. I got my degree in 1981. We had to make tough decisions about our private lives in order to have a career. There was a certain disappointment: Why isn’t the next generation doing that? But I felt it was totally her decision.”
Highlights of her work: Ms. Delegard published a book in 2011 based on her dissertation, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press). She has co-edited a textbook, Women, Families, and Communities (Pearson, 2007), and spent the past three years working as visual curator and a contract researcher for a book, North Country: The Making of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). In a good year, she estimates, she earns as much as $40,000, but her annual income has been as low as $5,000.
She won a $40,000 postdoctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2002, even though she didn’t have an academic job. That allowed her to focus on turning her dissertation into a book, and to pay for day care for her young son.
