As I mentioned in an earlier post, this summer Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association reported that religious history is now the largest single thematic subfield in the AHA membership. In the blog post on AHA Today, Townsend includes a chart that visualizes changes in the subfields of historians. Using the same data (PDF), which the AHA generously provided, I’ve created another chart to visualize the same change in a slightly different way.

Data provided by the American Historical Association. Used by permission.

Data provided by the American Historical Association. Used by permission.

This chart shows that the study of religious has gone from being a significant but only middle-of-the-pack subfield in 1992, to being in the top three subfields in 1999, to being the top subfield in 2009. Religious history is by no means dominant, considering the extraordinary diversity of the AHA membership, and especially in comparison to the dominance of social and even women’s history in 1992. From 2008 to 2009, the percentage of religious historians has slipped slightly, even at the same time that it overtook the percentage of cultural historians. (All of the top ten subfields declined as a percentage in 2009.) My tentative conclusion is that religious history is a growing subfield whose growth relative to the profession as a whole is magnified by long-term shifts towards increased diversity in the specialties of AHA members.

I should provide a few caveats about what this chart does not say. First, this chart reports AHA members identifying with a given subfield as a proportion of the total identifications, not as a proportion of the total membership of the AHA. AHA members are asked to identify with up to three subfields. So, from this data one cannot say that 7.7% of historians in 2009 identified as historians of religion. (That number does seem to be correct, however, calculated a different way.) Second, this chart does not give an indication of the numerous other subfields that AHA members identify with. I have chosen the top thirteen subfields in 2009, because they are the only fields garnering more than 3% of the responses. But in 2009, other subfields garnered 38.3% of the responses, compared to 18.3% in 1992. Third, it is important to recognize the fine distinctions between subfields. Over time, if I understand correctly, the AHA has added more subfields, so the increasing reported diversity of subfields may be driven as much by changes in the method of surveying as it is by actual changes in the membership. The fine distinctions in subfields also makes it difficult to rank them. For example, for 2009 this chart ranks women’s history third (6.4%) and gender history sixth (4.9%). But if those subfields were considered combined, say as women/gender history, then the total percentage (11.3%) would easily top all other subfields. Of course there is both overlap and distinction between those fields.