Pius Aeneas

I'll chime in and agree about notifications from programs generally picking up in February. Most universities have only been back in session for a couple weeks, and this is the time of year that departments are in various stages of things like job searches and other planning.

Yeah, generally the acceptances and interview requests start to come in toward the end of this month and continue through the next few months. Even if you don't hear anything early on, there's always the chance that notifications might go out quite late, even into April, for waitlist candidates.

What you should do between getting accepted and actually beginning the PhD will depend, I think. I was working a typical full-time 9 to 5 job when I applied and got accepted, so I honestly didn't do a whole lot because by the time I finished work each day I was usually mentally exhausted. I wish I'd spent more time reviewing the ancient languages, filling in gaps in my knowledge of Greek and Roman history, getting a firmer grasp on reading German, etc. I ended up spending a lot of time preparing to move, though. I talked to current students about where to live, did apartment and roommate hunting, weighed whether I'd need a car since I was going from a major metro area to a smaller town--the standard practical stuff. If you're still in school then in theory you might have more time to brush up on the academic things, assuming that you have a slightly lighter load in your final year. If you've got any academic stuff to brush up on then I'd say maybe focus on that, since you probably won't get a chance again while you're actually completing your PhD until you finish your coursework and exams and are ABD status. Hope all this is useful!

This is what I've taken to doing. I've gotten tired of people asking what exactly it is that I'm doing so I just tell them that I'm teaching while doing research to earn a PhD.

I don't know that your writing sample will hurt you, as long as you show that you can engage thoughtfully and competently with secondary scholarship and didn't ignore anything seminal, it's probably not a bad thing that you also showed your facility with the ancient sources. Also, the writing sample is just one component of your application--I would say equally important are your letters of recommendation and your statement of purpose.

Anyone else out there applying this cycle? The first couple waves of deadlines have passed now and the next wave will be coming with the new year. As someone currently at a top program I'm happy to answer questions!

GRE scores for the humanities in general only matter in the Verbal and Analytical Writing sections, and usually the scores are not at the top of the list in terms of importance for admission. Your statement, letters of recommendation, writing sample, and fit within the department are the most important components of your application. Your scores look fine as long as the rest of your application is strong.

Probably the most influential for me are Baxandall and Panofsky. Obviously Baxandall is quite an important figure in the field in general, but in particular I've been influenced by Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy as well his article "Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle." For Panofsky it's Meaning in the Visual Arts, but I imagine I'll end up reading a lot more of his work because iconography is an important aspect of my own research. Baxandall's work helped me better understand the whole social history of art approach. Merleau-Ponty's essay "Eye and Mind" was also extremely useful in making me think about things from a different perspective. Honestly, most of the scholars I read for my theory and method course in the first year of my PhD deepened my understanding of the myriad ways of looking at and understanding art.

Attempts at doing rankings of the best programs are generally sort of pointless because there's always several variables involved. If you're aiming for a top program that potentially leads to permanent (tenure-track) employment in academia, then generally the best programs will be Ivy or par-Ivy (i.e. some other highly ranked private universities or elite public flagships). However, there are always exceptions depending on your particular specialty as well as the influence and clout that your advisor possesses in said subfield.

I'll just address the parts of your post that I bolded and ignore the lazy attempts at sarcasm. First off, I scrolled through OP's twitter feed for quite awhile and the majority of their posts are retweets of links and other people's posts, none of which are abusive or inflammatory. OP's own tweets aren't particularly numerous and I saw nothing in them that was offensive or that attacked conservatives broadly, so I'm unsure how this indicates that they "paint with a broad brush." Perhaps you'd like the OP to post incisive critical dialectics instead? I'm not sure twitter is conducive to that line of argument, quite frankly. Moreover, I'm unsure that someone having a social media presence with a political slant indicates that they're going to "go off the rails by prioritizing personal causes over scholarship." Sure, this happens, but exactly how often does it happen? I'm going to take a stab and say the answer is "not very." When it does happen those stories get amplified because they fit into the false narrative of elitist academics working to undermine America and indoctrinate students or whatever. Lastly, the stories about offers of admission being rescinded were for "jokes" that included racism, antisemitism, child abuse. In the NYT article, it mentions a prospective student who used social media to trash other prospective students. This isn't at all equivalent to OP's twitter feed, and the NYT article even mentions online material pertaining to an "applicant who was involved in a political cause" and how this material "didn't significantly affect that student's admission prospects." It's ludicrous to think that people going into academia are going to be apolitical, especially when academia itself has become thoroughly politicized as the favorite target of politicians of a particular party who are doing their damnedest to destroy it. Moral of the story: make your social media accounts private so you don't have university administrators or professors with nothing better to do snooping around and getting the vapors from your political posts.

It seems this forum is dead (fitting given the state of the field, perhaps), but maybe we can breathe some life into it since application deadlines have started to pass! To answer OP, I think that quite frankly grades mean little as long as they aren't bad. Virtually everyone who applies for Classics and Classics-adjacent PhDs has excellent grades so what really matters for your application are your letters, your statement of purpose, and your language preparation (i.e. at least 3+ years of one of the ancient languages and 2+ of the other). If you're extremely concerned about the two Bs you might mention this to one of your letter writers so that they make a point of assuaging any potential doubts about your language skills. That said it seems like you only have a couple years for both Greek and Latin; this might be a bit slim for the programs you've listed. You might consider an MA or post-Bac if you need more language preparation before diving into a PhD.

I'm just browsing and I don't mean to derail the thread, but it seems that your problem with OP's tweets isn't that they're "not necessarily well informed" so much as the fact that they express a leftist worldview. I'm not sure that most professors care one way or another--if they even bother snooping around prospective students' social media pages in the first place. I imagine they'd be more concerned if a prospective student's online presence indicated that they were lazy or spent most of their time partying. Basically, you could have directed OP to the above thread and left it at that.

The answer is yes and no. Obviously going to a well-known and prestigious university can only help in the grand scheme of things. Are you dead set on going to a small conservative Catholic college? If you want small, there's well-known SLACs you might consider. If you want Catholic, there's places like Georgetown. That said, what really matters are your letters of recommendation and your statement of purpose along with language preparation.

I did my MA at the University of Arizona before starting my PhD, and when I was first applying (this was ~5 years) it seemed that most of the Classics MA programs worth attending covered tuition/fees/insurance and provided some kind of stipend. At Arizona, tuition and fees were covered through serving as a TA and the College of Humanities paid for health insurance. The stipend at the time was around $3700 per semester (I have no idea if it's the same now or has gone up or down) and was just barely enough to cover rent and utilities if you were lucky enough to share a cheap house/apt. If you were dumb enough to live in the university's grad housing, there was no way you could afford their highway robbery prices on the stipend alone. And of course, there is no summer funding unless you're attending some kind of summer seminar, excavation, etc. Short version: the stipend on its own really isn't livable despite the low cost of living in Tucson, so you will have to supplement it with savings, loans, or parental largesse. Overall though, Arizona is an excellent program. The faculty have diverse interests, are all competent scholars, and in general they are willing to do what they can to make sure their students succeed. The placement record into top PhD programs is also stellar, which is a concern more than ever in the wake of the collapse of Classics and the Humanities more broadly. Tucson is also a great city and the cost of living is dirt cheap. As far as not having started Latin in high school, you shouldn't worry about it. I was lucky enough to start as a sophomore in high school, but I attended a college prep so we had a more diverse array of language options than most high schools. As long as you have 3-4 years of one language and 2-3 of the other you should be fine. Moreover, having multidisciplinary interests is NOT a disadvantage. If you attain a strong grasp of the languages and you have a specialty or two which are fairly standard, having other interests should help rather than hurt you down the road. Long and rambling post, but hopefully it's helpful!

I've heard from two places--I've had one very positive phone interview and I have a campus interview at the end of next month. So far nothing else, but I suppose I'll go with the "no news is good news" since a lot of programs just seem to be sending out decisions or will be soon.