Episode 1.2 – Dr. Sarah Mellors

Overview

Dr. Sarah Mellors (’18) joins KHC to chat about her professional service work with the American Historical Association.

Show notes

Episode transcript

Stephanie Narrow (00:13):

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. Sarah Mellors. Sarah earned her PhD in history from UCI in 2018, and is now an assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, where she teaches courses on Chinese, East Asian, and world history. Her research sits at the intersection of gender studies and the history of medicine, and examines the history of abortion and birth control in modern China. She is also the Councilor At Large, as well as a member of the Graduate and Early Career Committee for the American Historical Association, otherwise known as the AHA, which is the largest professional organization for historians in the United States. And Sarah joins us today to speak a little bit more about her service work with the AHA. So Sarah welcome. We’re so happy to have you.

Dr. Sarah Mellors (01:13):

Hi Stephanie, thank you for this invitation and this opportunity.

Stephanie Narrow (01:17):

Of course. So the council that you serve on at AHA is the AHA’s governing body. What exactly does it do?

Dr. Sarah Mellors (01:26):

So for me, before I became involved with the AHA as the Councilor At Large, I really had no idea what the AHA did or what the governing body, the Executive Council, does. But now I see that it’s actually a rather large council of people from really all walks of historical life. So there are people who are faculty members, high school teachers, people who curate museum exhibits, et cetera. And we all work together to draft policy statements for the organization. We also cover all aspects of council decision-making, and it’s a pretty intensive role in that everyone who is on the council is extremely thoughtful. So every decision we make on behalf of the council is debated at great, detailed length, because everyone is deeply committed to doing the right thing for the organization and for the people that it represents. Typically we go through everything together, everything from like the minutia of budgeting to new initiatives to the work of the teaching and professional committees and various sub committees under the Executive Committee, we draft these policy statements that, to the average person might not seem controversial, but we end up debating even just the vocabulary or the tone of the document. What should we be endorsing? What would the constituents, so to speak, want us to say, how can we best serve them?

Stephanie Narrow (03:05):

So what does it mean by your being a Councilor At Large?

Dr. Sarah Mellors (03:09):

The history of the Councilor At Large position is an interesting one. So prior to me getting that position, only one person had had the Councilor At Large position, and it was created because people on the council, or people who were represented by the AHA, felt that there wasn’t enough attention to graduate and early career issues. There wasn’t a liaison between GECC, the Graduate and Early Career Committee, and the council itself.

Stephanie Narrow (03:41):

So how do you become a Councilor for the AHA’s council? Is there an election or are you appointed?

Dr. Sarah Mellors (03:47):

Before I became involved with the AHA, I would have thought of it as kind of an organization I could never be involved with because I didn’t know anyone in high places, but in reality, the AHA is looking for people to volunteer themselves, to be involved with its programs. In my case, some mentor of mine nominated me for the position. When the AHA council was seeking nominations, I drafted a short statement. There was an election, I won it. And that’s how I came to be the Councilor At Large. But a lot of it is either who, you know, or making it very obvious to people on the Executive Council that you want to be involved and they’ll be thrilled. And you may regret it later because they’ll never stop asking you. You want to help. And I mean that in the nicest way.

Stephanie Narrow (04:40):

So how long is your term as a Councilor? Is it a position that, once you’re elected to you serve indefinitely or at least until you decide to step down, or is there a term limit?

Dr. Sarah Mellors (04:52):

It’s a three-year term, which it’s three years both on the Executive Council and on the Graduate and Early Career Committee. So it can feel a little bit overwhelming at times because it is a long period of time.

Stephanie Narrow (05:06):

So what exactly does the GECC do? I presume they advocate for graduate students, as well as newly-minted PhDs. I’m wondering if you could provide us with a little bit of insight.

Dr. Sarah Mellors (05:17):

So that is exactly what our mandate is, to advocate for early career researchers and PhD students, Master’s students, even in some cases, undergraduate history students. A lot of our work revolves around developing workshops for the annual meeting. So we host at the annual meeting a variety of different types of events from open mic events, to seminars and career diversity workshops – that in some ways kind of parallel your work as a Career Diversity Fellow. We also host events that bring in historians at different stages in their career and in different industries to talk about their different career paths and how they got to where they are today. People also held workshops that talk about various aspects of professionalization, the challenges that are kind of unique to being a graduate student, such as needing to unionize to get, you know, the basic money you need to survive. But we also cover things like applying to graduate school, finding a mentor, how to publish all sorts of things that we feel would benefit people around us. We also, in addition to all of that, lately we’ve been holding an extensive amount of events where we we’ve been having these kind of informal chats where sometimes the president will sit in on these meetings. So people feel like their voices are being heard. And that’s been very interesting. It’s allowed us to broaden our kind of network of people where we’re drawing on. And also a lot of the people who show up to those types of events are not afraid to voice their concerns. So we get a lot of really useful feedback. Oftentimes the feedback that students give us reminds us that we already have prepared the resources that they’re asking for. They’re just not aware that they exist. So students will say, “Why can’t I find information on how to put together my qualifying exam committee?” And we’ll say, “Well, actually we have an entire section of the AHA website devoted to questions like that.” And it’s actually at this point – it used to not be so well organized – but at this point it’s literally any question one could have related to being a historian at any point in your career. There’s probably one or more articles or podcasts or whatever, devoted just to those questions.

Stephanie Narrow (07:45):

And I will say the resources that the AHA has available on the website, it really is just an amazing resource, not only for graduate students and early career scholars, but there are a range of resources for professors: there’s sample syllabi for different professionalization courses. And I’m just getting out of my comps year. I consulted the AHA resources for graduate students so many times, because while there is a general guideline for what your PhD journey looks like, there is no definitive blueprint for it. So there’s a fair amount of wiggle room and you have to find out where and what works best for you. And I felt that the AHA’s resources were really great at filling in some of those gray areas that I had questions about that some of my peers or faculty – not that they weren’t helpful – but gave me another perspective, if anything.

Dr. Sarah Mellors (08:34):

I didn’t even know about those resources perhaps, because they were kind of under renovation up until my last year in graduate school. And so, as I was leaving, I became aware of those resources and I thought, “Gosh, I could have saved so much time and energy, if I’d been aware of these things. I even show them to my undergraduates because they’re just so wide ranging and useful.

Stephanie Narrow (08:59):

And I actually find that a lot of the [GECC] workshops at the annual meeting are some of the most well attended sessions.

Dr. Sarah Mellors (09:06):

Yeah. And the career diversity workshops, I mean, you would probably know better than me, but it seemed to be extremely, extraordinarily well attended, especially kind of in collaboration with the GECC workshops because they kind of dovetail in some ways.

Stephanie Narrow (09:20):

So to get back to some more of your service work between the GECC and your work at the Councilor At Large, it seems like you have a very full professional plate. And I’m wondering how you balance your work with the AHA with some of your other professional responsibilities, like teaching and research.

Dr. Sarah Mellors (09:37):

Well, I have in part my own department to thank, because it’s on an institution by institution or department by department basis, whether something like working for the GECC counts towards your service obligations. And my department has been fairly generous, actually quite generous, about counting that toward me fulfilling my annual service obligations. That said, I do serve on, like, five other committees within my university, possibly even more than that because there’s college, university, and department level service. So while it does count, I’m not, I can’t just use that as an excuse to drop the ball on other things. I’m still expected to do the same amount of service, or more or less the same amount, as other people. So it does require some degree of prioritizing and navigating. But one thing that’s really cool about working with the AHA is it is time intensive at certain points in the year, but it’s not consistently time-consuming, I’m not always doing a ton of AHA related work. Really the workload is done mostly in preparation for the two meetings, the annual meeting and then another meeting (The Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA) that we have typically in June. The workload does reflect the crises in the field. So if there’s a pandemic, the AHA is dealing with some sort of unforeseen thing, suddenly there’s a lot of work to do, but I find that my work with the AHA often nicely parallels the work that I’m doing in the classroom or with my own research. So it helps me think more pragmatically about a lot of the questions that I’m thinking about with my own work.

Stephanie Narrow (11:23):

And to our final questions, we have our words of wisdom. This is a section where we ask you to impart your insight. What advice would you give to graduate students who are interested in service opportunities, like something at the AHA or even within their university?

Dr. Sarah Mellors (11:39):

Well, if you’re interested in an opportunity like this, I think it’s always great to get involved, but it has to be something you are genuinely interested in. I would say choose wisely, but also be open-minded remembering that it is unpaid labor and we can only do so much without getting behind on our actual responsibilities. Other things that I’ve been thinking about lately with regard to graduate school, we’ve all had that moment where it was like, how will I get funding? How will I be able to afford my rent? How will I be able to have a job? And I would just say, try to stay realistic, but positive.

Stephanie Narrow (12:18):

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.