“It’s really important to not lock yourself in, not have the mindset that you need to figure out immediately after finishing your PhD what you’re going to do and where you’re going to do it for the next several decades of your life.”
Dr. Maura Cunningham
Overview
Dr. Maura Cunningham joins KHC to chat about her post-PhD work and non-faculty career pathways.
Show Notes
Dr. Maura Elizabeth Cunningham earned her History PhD from UC Irvine in 2014. She is a writer and historian of modern China whose work has appeared at the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and as well as other publications. She is the co-author, along with UCI Professor of History Jeffrey Wasserstrom, of the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Maura is the Digital Media Manager at the Association for Asian Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
For more information on the organizations, resources, and people mentioned in this episode, scroll through the transcript below for links to related material.
Episode Transcript
Stephanie Narrow 00:12
Welcome to the Krieger Hall Chronicles, a podcast that invites students, alumni, and faculty from UC Irvine’s history department to share their diverse professional work as scholars, historians, and public intellectuals. I’m your host, Stephanie Narrow, and today with us we have Dr. Maura Cunningham.
Stephanie Narrow 00:29
Maura earned her history PhD from UC Irvine in 2014. She is a writer and a historian of modern China, whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as many other publications. She’s the co-author, along with UCI Professor of History Jeffrey Wasserstrom, of the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. Maura is the Digital Media Manager at the Association for Asian Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And she is here with us today to speak a little bit more about her post-PhD work and non-faculty career pathways. So Maura, welcome!
Dr. Maura Cunningham 01:03
Thanks so much for inviting me, I’m really glad to be here.
Stephanie Narrow 01:05
So thinking back to when you came to UCI, did you enter into the PhD interested in non-faculty careers? What did you imagine your professional life to hopefully look like when you finished your PhD?
Dr. Maura Cunningham 01:19
Yeah, so I was very unusual when I was applying to graduate school in the fall of 2007, this would probably still be unusual now, maybe a little bit less so. But I was really outside the norm in that even before I applied to PhD programs, I knew that I was not interested in what we would consider a traditional academic career. I had done a little bit of teaching and I knew that that wasn’t really where I wanted my focus to be. I was much more energized by research and writing and sort of figuring out how to present interesting history to general audiences. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with that after I got my PhD, but I knew that more than almost any other place I could possibly think of UCI History would be the place where I could figure that out, and get guidance from professors and sort of develop the skills that I would need to take with me after I finished. I didn’t have a very clear idea of where I was going. And now, more than a decade later, I can say that a lot of the platforms that I’ve wound up working on in my career didn’t even really exist or certainly weren’t popular when I started the Ph. D program. So would have been very hard for me to imagine that I would make a career in writing online in sort of different digital media, because so many of them are more recent development. But I was really interested in getting the skills that I would need to go on to be a sort of public historian, in a way, although I didn’t know that that was what it was called then, I didn’t know the term public intellectual or, or anything like that. But I knew that I wanted to research, I wanted to write, I wanted to travel, and UCI History had so many great faculty members who were doing interesting sorts of work that spoke to different audiences, or were kind of in more unusual genres, writing about history and communicating with the public. So it seemed like a great place for me to get that sort of training.
Stephanie Narrow 03:18
And hearing you talk about, you know, the reasons why you entered into graduate school and the things that interest you, a lot of that resonates with me. I started my Master’s degree, even before I came to UCI, with an express intent on entering into some sort of public facing career where I can use my skills as a historian and as a scholar to speak to broader audiences. And it just so happened the year that I applied to UCI and the year I came, at same time that Laura Mitchell was working on this Career Diversity Grant with AHA. And I knew a bit about the AHA Career Diversity Initiative, and so it was just so serendipitous that these conversations were starting to generate at UCI at the same moment.
Dr. Maura Cunningham 03:57
I mean, definitely. So I started the program at UCI in the fall of 2008, which was just as the financial crisis was hitting us and the next couple of years after that really cratered. And so it was a conversation that was really getting more and more widespread while I was in grad school. And like I said, there were a lot of professors at UCI History who were already doing the work that I was interested in. But they had done so from a position of getting a tenure track job, getting tenure, and then sort of doing a lot of that, you know, writing for non-academic audiences or expanding the scope of their careers. But they had, I think, I would say most of them had followed a sort of traditional academic path up until the point when they got tenure, and then they started to branch out. But when I was in the program, there were quite a number of us who were interested in doing that work well before we entered a career track. So in graduate school, or for some people it was after they got their PhD and they did go on to tenure track jobs, but they were still working in different ranges and talking to different audiences. So it was a really supportive environment to have those sorts of interests and those sorts of ideas about what kind of career you might want to have. Nobody ever said to me, “You shouldn’t be doing this.”
Stephanie Narrow 05:15
So looking back on your post-PhD career trajectory, in addition to your current work with the Association of Asian Studies, you’ve also worked for other China focused organizations as we ll as nonprofits. You know, we’ve touched upon that you are really drawn towards public facing work and scholarship, but what specifically draws you to working with China focused or Asia focused organizations? What do you find most fulfilling about this type of work?
Dr. Maura Cunningham 05:39
After I finished my PhD in 2014, I went to work for an organization in New York called the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which is a non-governmental organization that promotes constructive engagement between the two sides. And I think that’s a really great summary of what I want to do with my career. And with my scholarship, I think constructive engagement between the United States and China is something we desperately need in the world today. And I regard it as really the driving force behind a lot of the work that I do is trying to raise awareness of China in the United States; raise awareness of how U.S.-China relations affect all of us, even people who don’t see their lives as directly affected by what goes on between the two countries. And so in my own writing, for various publications – in the book that Jeff and I co-authored a couple of years ago on China in the 21st century, you know, we really try to explain and put into context, what’s going on in the world today. So I think, I consider it very important that you know the history behind how we got here, the paths not taken, and the places where relations have been stronger and the reasons for that, and the times when relations have been weaker – like they are right now. So I really think it’s important that everyone understands the history of the relationship between these two massive countries, and all of the ups and downs.
Stephanie Narrow 07:07
So the Association for Asian Studies, or AAS, is a professional organization for scholars and people who are interested in the study of Asia. How would you describe some of the goals or initiatives or even some of the overall scope of AAS to someone who is encountering the organization for the first time?
Dr. Maura Cunningham 07:27
Sure. So the AAS is, I think, what we would consider a sort of traditional scholarly Association, although we are changing a lot. Both, we were already sort of on a course to make some changes, and then the recent pandemic has really accelerated some of the transitions that we were making. But its main purpose is a scholarly association for anyone who’s interested in the study of Asia. Like a lot of associations, our primary event during the year is and annual conference that brings together approximately 3000 to 3500 people in various cities around the country. And we provide a venue for people to talk about their scholarship, to exchange ideas, to collaborate on projects, we provide grants to support research. We have a publication, the Journal of Asian Studies. We also have an education journal, called Education About Asia, that provides teaching resources for the classroom. So we we support the study of Asia in many, many different ways. And just as my own work on a personal level is driven by increasing understanding of the United States and China, as does that on a larger scale of increasing understanding broadly about Asia.
Stephanie Narrow 08:39
And you currently serve as AAS’s Digital Media Manager, what are your responsibilities? I mean, you’ve mentioned AAS is starting to reassess some of its own organizational structures, as well as its initiatives. And all that given, what does a typical work week look like for you?
Dr. Maura Cunningham 08:56
So as the Digital Media Manager, I am basically responsible for anything that we have that’s online. So I take care of our website. And I work with a web design company to keep that in, in good health. I oversee our Asian Now blog, which is a venue for people to write about issues in Asian Studies and affecting scholars of Asian Studies. I do all of our social media, so Twitter, Facebook, Instagram posts. We’re starting very soon a new webinar series, and I’m taking the lead on kind of the production of that and getting things lined up and so forth. So those are very broadly some of the biggest areas that I work on. But as far as the typical work week, that’s a little bit harder to say. Again, very broadly, I kind of start every day setting up our social media feeds for the day, I make sure that the websites are looking good, I make any updates my colleagues have requested to the website. A couple of times a week I’ll have an Asian Now post to put up on the blog. So I do all of those things. I edit incoming Asia Now posts, and respond to pitches and things like that. But we also have various special projects going on at any given time. So lots of emails is how I would describe my typical work week, especially now that everything’s going remote. But very broadly speaking, I would say my role is overseeing the association’s communications and engagement online with its membership.
Stephanie Narrow 10:27
And so lastly, we have our words of wisdom. What advice would you give to current PhD students who are interested in thinking beyond the tenure track and want to explore careers outside of the professoriate?
Dr. Maura Cunningham 10:39
So I think it’s very important to try to get as much experience in as many different areas as you can. When I was coming into the PhD program at UCI, like I said, I knew that I didn’t want to do a tenure track job, I had sort of vague ideas that maybe I’d be interested in museum work, or like documentary filmmaking. Again, just sort of anything that would help me talk about history to a general audience. And it was only through some trial and error and different opportunities that I had while I was in grad school, that I came to realize that I probably didn’t actually want to do museum work, I probably don’t have the eye, the artistic eye, to do documentary filmmaking. But I love to write and I love to edit. So it was through working on a blog that we had, when I was at UCI called the China Beat. I was editing that, and that’s how I realized that that was, that was something I love to do. I had a couple of kind of like summer jobs, working for a few different programs to do curriculum development and things like that. And I enjoyed those. But I kind of realized through that experience, that it probably wasn’t really where I wanted to focus my career. So there was a little bit of trial and error and figuring out what I was good at, where my interests lie, and things like that. And so I think that I always tell people, it’s important not to have a dream job, because I think that often leads to disappointment. And as I said, at the beginning, I could never have imagined in 2008, that in 2020, I would be something called the Digital Media Manager for scholarly association, because that position really didn’t exist back when I was in grad school. So I think it’s important to be flexible to try to get as many different experiences as you can. And these days there, there are more and more programs that are aimed at helping students get that sort of experience outside the academy. And just be willing to rethink your career every once in a while. Like I said, I started out at a very different organization after I’d finished my PhD, and I enjoyed working there, but for various reasons realized it wasn’t the right fit, and that it wasn’t a place where I could stay for decades and decades. So I realized that I needed to look elsewhere and move on. And that’s how I wound up at AAS. But it’s really important to not lock yourself in or not have the mindset that you need to figure out immediately after finishing your PhD, what you’re going to do and where you’re going to do it for the next several decades of your life. I didn’t realize that when I was in grad school, but over time, I’ve come to appreciate all the different experiences that I had in the different projects I worked on, because those really helped me identify what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, and what I can envision doing, you know, 40 hours a week.
Stephanie Narrow 13:32
To learn more about this episode, including show notes and a full transcript of today’s episode, please visit our website at sites.uci.edu/KriegerHallChronicles. For the Krieger Hall Chronicles, I’m Stephanie Narrow, and thanks for tuning in.