Karen Kelsky – författare

UPDATED FOR 2026 • The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs, and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their PhD into their ideal job—now refreshed with new material to equip readers for today’s job market“If you want unvarnished straight talk about the academic job market—and how to navigate it—then heed Karen Kelsky, and heed her now.”—Rebecca Schuman, education columnist for SlateEach year thousands of students earn their PhDs, but only a small percentage land a job. For every tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many who simply give up in frustration. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers solve the mystery of the academic job market. As a former tenured professor and department head, and the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site TheProfessorIsIn, she has helped thousands land their dream careers. With The Professor Is In, Dr. Kelsky has poured all her best advice into a guide that addresses the most important issues facing any PhD, including:• When, where, and what to publish• Writing a foolproof grant application• Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV• Acing the job talk and campus interview• Avoiding the adjunct trap• Making the leap to nonacademic work when the time is rightThe Professor Is In addresses all of these issues—and now it’s been overhauled to arm the latest generation of readers. This revised edition features updates throughout and new candid chapters on the risks of academia, the importance of making it work for you, the need to rethink the search committee, and even the possibility of life outside the Ivory Tower.

The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D.  into their ideal job   Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration.   Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success.  They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options.   Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers.   Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including:   -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right   The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Over the past few decades, many young Japanese women have emerged as Japan’s most enthusiastic “internationalists,” investing in study or work abroad, or in romance with Western men as opportunities to circumvent what they consider their country’s oppressive corporate and family structures. Drawing on a rich supply of autobiographical narratives, as well as literary and cultural texts, Karen Kelsky situates this phenomenon against a backdrop of profound social change in Japan and within an intricate network of larger global forces.In exploring the promises, limitations, and contradictions of these “occidental longings,” Women on the Verge exposes the racial and erotic politics of transnational mobility. Kelsky shows how female cosmopolitanism recontextualizes the well-known Western male romance with the Orient: Japanese women are now the agents, narrating their own desires for the “modern” West in ways that seem to defy Japanese nationalism as well as long-standing relations of power not only between men and women but between Japan and the West. While transnational movement is not available to all Japanese women, Kelsky shows that the desire for the foreign permeates many Japanese women’s lives. She also reveals how this feminine allegiance to the West-and particularly to white men-can impose its own unanticipated hegemonies of race, sexuality, and capital. Combining ethnography and literary analysis, and bridging anthropology and cultural studies, Women on the Verge will also appeal to students and scholars of Japan studies, feminism, and global culture.