When people talk about leadership in academia, the conversation often focuses on STEM environments: leading labs, managing grants, building research infrastructure, or supervising large teams. In the humanities, leadership is discussed far less often and many researchers are skeptical of the term altogether: It often sounds business-oriented, disconnected from academic work, and, frankly, a bit like a buzzword.

Leadership in the humanities is more than a buzzword though. Many of the challenges currently shaping the humanities are deeply connected to leadership questions: how collaborative and supportive research environments are created, how talented researchers are recruited and retained, how international teams and perspectives are integrated, how academia deals with power dynamics, exclusion, or nepotism, and how questions of inclusion and equal opportunities are addressed in everyday academic culture.

At the same time, increasing technologization and the growing influence of AI are forcing the humanities to position themselves more clearly and communicate their relevance more confidently, both within academia and beyond it.

One difficulty is that many humanities researchers already do this kind of work without describing it as leadership at all. Organizing collaborations, mentoring students, navigating institutional structures, building networks, or creating inclusive research environments often disappear behind labels like “service,” “coordination,” or simply “helping out.” As a result, not only individual researchers, but often the humanities more broadly, underestimate how much leadership work and leadership experience already exist within the field.

But what does leadership in the humanities actually look like in practice and why does recognizing it more consciously matter?

To explore these questions further, we also spoke with Carolin Krahn, Professor of Historical Musicology, about what leadership in humanities contexts looks like in everyday academic practice.

Academic leadership in the humanities often happens without formal authority

A lot of leadership work in the humanities does not really look like leadership at first.

You are organizing a workshop because nobody else does it. You help bring people together for a panel. You coordinate an edited volume. You explain institutional processes to new colleagues. You try to keep a collaboration running when everyone is overwhelmed and on temporary contracts.

None of this usually comes with authority or status. But it still shapes how research happens.

In many humanities contexts, leadership is often less hierarchical and more relational. A lot of it is really a form of so-called lateral leadership: influencing projects, discussions, and collaborations without formally managing people.

And honestly, many postdocs already do this constantly without calling it leadership.

At the same time, leadership in the humanities often starts with managing uncertainty, resources, and yourself within a system that has become increasingly precarious. As Carolin points out:

“Given the strained situation in the humanities over the past several years, leadership in this field first and foremost requires a high degree of self-management, intrinsic motivation, and a keen understanding of available resources – resources that one must continually strive to secure by means of grant-writing.”

Teaching and supervision are often where leadership starts

Many researchers probably first experience leadership in teaching, even if they would never frame it that way.

Running a seminar is not only about expertise. You are also managing discussions, handling uncertainty, creating participation, and reacting to different personalities and expectations in real time. Depending on the classroom, this can become surprisingly complex.

The same is true for supervision.

For many postdocs, supervising students is the first moment where someone else actually depends on them professionally. And at the same time, most people are never really trained for it.

In that sense, teaching and supervision are forms of leadership because they shape how other people work, develop confidence, experience academia, and position themselves within it. You are not only transferring knowledge. You are creating an environment, setting expectations, influencing communication, and indirectly shaping what academic culture feels like for other people.

These dynamics become especially important for researchers who already experience academia differently, including women, international researchers, first-generation academics, or other underrepresented groups. Small everyday behaviors often influence whether people feel included, taken seriously, and able to participate fully in academic environments.

Carolin emphasizes that supervision and mentoring also means paying close attention to where people are in their academic development and understanding that researchers at different qualification stages often need very different forms of support. She describes how demanding this can become in humanities contexts, where researchers often work highly individually as sole authors and where a sense of community does not emerge automatically through shared lab structures.

Supporting junior researchers therefore often requires extensive mentoring, personalized feedback on long manuscripts far outside one’s own specialization, and actively helping people develop not only as researchers, but also as academic personalities and authors, especially in the age of AI. And because academic careers in the humanities are often highly uncertain, supervision also includes helping people orient themselves professionally:

“Since career paths in the humanities are anything but predetermined, it is also important to support your team with sound guidance tailored to their specific talents and to offer them insights into practical professional life, whether in academia or beyond.”

Carolin adds:

“I also believe it is my responsibility to make it clear to people early on that an academic career is virtually impossible to plan these days, without discouraging them, and to show them the career options available so that they can make their own decisions against the background of a solid understanding of the panorama.”

Conferences and networks are also forms of leadership

In the humanities, leadership often happens through intellectual exchange and community-building.

When researchers organize panels, connect people across institutions, start collaborations, or create spaces for discussion, they actively shape which ideas, topics, and people gain visibility and momentum within a field.

That is leadership too.

Not because it comes with authority, but because it influences how academic communities develop, who gets included, and what kinds of conversations become possible.

Carolin also emphasizes the importance of actively creating perspectives and opportunities for others:

“On the one hand, you need to foster a stimulating dialogue about everyday duties and scholarship as well as exchange within the team more broadly, while on the other hand actively opening up perspectives and networking opportunities to support personal development.”

Understanding university structures as academic leadership

At some point, many researchers realize that academic work is not only about research and teaching. It is also about understanding how universities actually function.

Who makes decisions? Which committees matter? Where does informal influence exist? Why do some ideas move forward while others disappear?

Researchers who understand these structures are often better able to build collaborations, navigate conflicts, create opportunities, and support others more effectively, especially in environments that can feel difficult to navigate for early-career and international researchers.

In that sense, academic leadership is also about helping people and projects move through complex institutional systems, not only through formal authority, but through orientation, experience, and the ability to navigate structures that are often not very transparent.

Carolin points out that many of these responsibilities and acquired skills, like understanding the system, only become fully visible later in academic careers. Especially during the postdoc phase, researchers are often primarily focused on building their research profile, even though leadership roles eventually require a much broader set of skills and responsibilities beyond research itself.

 “You continuously bear a great deal of responsibility for personnel management, administrative matters, financial management, curriculum planning, and public relations. No monograph, no matter how painstakingly crafted over the years, prepares you for this range of responsibilities. Not to mention the need for sound familiarity with formal legal requirements, which can vary depending on the university, state, and location. Since usually no one prepares you for this during your academic training, you must take it upon yourself to fully inform yourself about the legal framework within which your professional responsibilities are defined.”

Carolin adds how much of academic leadership consists of communication and coordination across very different contexts, both within and beyond the university. This includes advocating for teaching and research, connecting different stakeholders, coordinating projects, and making academic work visible to broader audiences.

Why recognizing leadership matters

Recognizing these forms of leadership more consciously matters for humanities researchers, because many of these experiences involve exactly the kinds of skills later required in academic and non-academic roles: communication, coordination, mentoring, navigating institutions, and creating environments in which other people can work well.

It can also help humanities researchers become more confident in their own competencies and professional value. Especially at a time when AI and technological change are leading many people to question the relevance of humanities skills, it becomes increasingly important to recognize that many researchers already develop complex leadership, communication, and relational competencies throughout their academic work.

Ultimately, reflecting more consciously on how humanities researchers lead themselves and others is not only about individual career development. It is also about recognizing that researchers actively shape the academic system and research culture.