The Society of Architectural Historians has signed the urging universities to make a series of specific accommodations for faculty and students whose research has been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read the statement below.
Approved by AHA Council, July 2020
COVID-19 is not just altering historians’ everyday life; it has also upended historical research. Although most university and college administrators have issued FAQs, guidelines, and resources that relate to the continuance of laboratory and human subjects research, they have not always addressed the conditions under which historians work or considered how to make accommodations for historical research during the pandemic. Moreover, in assessing productivity at this moment, it is imperative that university administrations recognize the distinctions among disciplines in types of research and to take into account the unusually burdensome tasks of teaching now affecting all instructors.
Historical research generally involves identifying and analyzing primary documents, which can include written, visual, aural, or material resources. Archives, special collections at historical societies and libraries, museums, historic sites, and other repositories typically hold these materials. In many cases, scholars must travel to a particular archive to consult materials that are not available for external loan or in digital form. University departments and divisions, government sources of funding, and private sources such as foundations frequently support such research. Presently, however, domestic and international travel is prohibited or limited by many institutions, and many of these entities are suspending or postponing distribution of research money and cancelling fellowship competitions. Such actions are delaying or inhibiting historical research for an indefinite period. In addition, students and non-tenure-track and contingent faculty are in many cases experiencing restrictions to onsite-only library privileges. For graduate students, limited access to research is extending time to graduation. For early career scholars, limited research access is already slowing the publication of articles and books on which employment and tenure decisions are largely based. Lack of access to research materials also potentially disadvantages mid-level scholars in the promotion process.
At the same time, repositories that safeguard and allow access to researchers have suffered staff layoffs, lost revenue, and in many cases the closing of their doors. The tasks of librarians, archivists, and curators have multiplied; they have taken on new public health training duties while continuing to try to answer reference questions in the absence of shelf access. Future conservation and digitization projects have been put on hold. Libraries are instead engaging in many cases in rapid-response collecting initiatives to capture peoples’ experiences during the pandemic. Serving researchers under such conditions is difficult at best.
The AHA recognizes that sustaining historical research during the COVID-19 crisis requires flexible and innovative approaches to the conduct of research itself as well as to how we gauge productivity. To that end, the AHA makes the following observations and recommendations.
Because PhD students and early career scholars are especially disadvantaged right now, we suggest the following:
- Under the current circumstances, advisors and departments should assist PhD students in exploring dissertation topics that can, at least in the early phases, be accomplished us
