One of the issues to emerge from the run-up to this year’s American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting, which concluded last weekend in Chicago, is the need for reform in graduate training in history and the humanities.

Successive articles by outgoing AHA President Anthony Grafton and by AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman, including one co-written piece, have argued that historians need to prepare graduate students for public history and non-history jobs, in addition to research and teaching positions.  These calls for reform provoked quite a debate in the blogosphere before the AHA and several sessions at the conference deepened the discussion.

An article in Chronicle of Higher Education outlines the current state of the debate over new directions in graduate teaching in history.