poliscar

Just curious here, but why would you think that a Comparative Lit degree would reduce your chances of employment? Lots of Comp Lit PhDs end up teaching in English Departments in the end if English literature is one of their fields of specialty. Also, the employment prospects coming out of a program like UCSC Literature or Duke Literature aren't going to be any better than those of a Comp Lit. program. Berkeley, for example, has placed a good 13 Comp Lit PhDs in English departments over the last 8 or 9 years.

Have you considered working with Christopher Nealon at Johns Hopkins?

I don't know—for Assistant Profs UBC is 5/14 Canadian/American, McGill is 1/6, and Toronto is 2/10. In the cases of both McGill and Toronto, the 3 hires are all Canadianist, so we're looking at exactly 0 recent non-Canadianist hires, while UBC has 3 non-Canadianists with Canadian doctorates. Overall, looking at the most notable Canadian schools, 3/25 non-Canadian, tenure-track positions were filled by scholars from American or British universities. I would hardly call that packed with Canadians. Of course, you could look at other schools (York, UWO, Queen's, etc) but past a point you're not longer talking about top departments. In terms of funding, U of T says it offers a guaranteed $15,000, UBC mentions a tuition waiver + $16,000 for "top recruits in the incoming doctoral class," and McGill mentions a "guaranteed four years of support" but doesn't list numbers. I'm not sure where you're talking about in terms of departments. (Long story short, I don't think it's advisable to do a PhD at a Canadian school if you can get into a good American school. The departments are good, yes, but the career prospects aren't.)

As another Canadian who has been given the same advice, I can say that it is entirely about employment. A PhD from a Canadian school just won't get you a job. If you look at recent hires at top Canadian schools—say McGill, Toronto, UBC—you'll notice that almost all recent hires are coming from top American schools, the exception being Canadian literature, of course. In quite a few cases as well these hires are Canadian citizens returning to the country after completing a PhD abroad, giving them an added advantage in the hiring process. Because of this, those with Canadian PhDs are typically left to work at smaller universities or colleges, or as adjuncts/sessionals. If you're not Canadian, you're going to be squeezed out of these jobs by people with citizenship. Canadian schools are also far less likely to provide you with good funding, as most funding for graduate students comes from SSHRC grants. I know Toronto only guarantees $15,000 a year, and Toronto is probably the most generous school. Long story short, don't go to a Canadian school for your Doctorate unless you're Canadian, and even then it's a definite gamble. (As a side note, I should say that U of T does have a really good placement record in Medieval Studies and Early Modern lit, but other than that Canadian schools are risky.)

Check out http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/living-form

What about Duke? Marianna Torgovnick and Nancy Armstrong could both be really amazing, and they have a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. It would probably be difficult to say no to a course with Elizabeth Grosz as well.

That's when you become addicted to aaaaarg.org instead

You'll have to name schools, because as far as I've seen Harvard's line of thinking is pretty standard. "A college major in art history is a desirable but not necessary prerequisite to admission to graduate study here. The department welcomes students who have received sound training in other branches of the humanities or other disciplines, or who have engaged in practical work in museums and galleries." Furthermore, the realities you name are realities of graduate study in general. It's a bit belittling for you to act as though the OP's interest is frivolous or lacking rigour because it's based on a study abroad experience. I think most people are fully aware that they aren't going to spend the majority of a graduate degree waltzing around Paris or Florence, whether the degree is in Art History or History or Literature.

I think people are really, really, really overstating the importance of Art History coursework, and I agree with condivi. More often than not, students are accepted to doctoral programs in Art History with BAs in Literature, History, etc. To argue that Art Historical methodology is so radically distinct from that of other fields in the humanities that one would have trouble moving between said fields, is realistically quite stupid. Obviously there's a definite Art Historical "canon" (Alberti through Gombrich, etc), but I would guess that the near majority of sources used in Art History are sources found outside of the "field." Most "Theory," for example, is based in and around literature programs. Also, as a side note neither Hal Foster, nor T.J. Clark or Julia Bryan-Wilson has a B.A. in Art History. You're looking at History and Literature degrees in all three cases, and they're top-notch in their subfields. I'd assume the same would apply to other subfields, with undergrad degrees ranging from Women's and Gender Studies to Medieval Studies. Don't worry about your undergraduate degree. If you have done well, have language capabilities (French, German, Italian, etc), and have a good, field-related writing sample, you're fine. Don't do a Post-Bacc; apply to MA programs, and potentially PhD programs if you feel comfortable enough.

New materialisms, material exchange, environmental history and object histories. http://www.culturalhistoriesofthematerialworld.com/ is really fantastic and cutting-edge; I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of work became "hot" in the coming years, although in some ways it already is. History of Science is also a huge deal right now—bigger than it has ever been in my opinion—and I would not be surprised if it became more of a "normal science" in History at large. Almost all of the recent hires at my institution (Medieval - 20th century, China - Latin America, Cultural, Political, Economic, etc) have backgrounds in History of Science, and are also doing pathbreaking work in the aforementioned fields. I think that's going to be more and more common in the future.

I would also look at anthropology departments... I'm sure there are scholars doing ethnographic work on fandoms.

Nope. As long as you have the languages down you'll be fine.

PMLA is also excellent, particularly for Film Studies and Theory.

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Grey Room, October, Representations, Word and Image, Texte zur Kunst, Oxford Art Journal, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, diacritics, boundary 2, Common Knowledge, Art History, New German Critique, Studies in Iconography, The Journal of Modern Craft, The Getty Research Journal, The Art Bulletin... Off the top of my head atm.

ProQuest --> Dissertations Advised --> Googling names can give you a really good idea of a a professor's ability to place his or her students in tenure-track jobs.

Carol Armstrong (Yale), Robin Kelsey (Harvard), Anne McCauley (Princeton), Eduardo Cadava (Princeton), John Tagg (Binghamton), Ariella Azoulay (Brown), Geoffrey Batchen (CUNY), Alex Nemerov (Stanford), Louis Kaplan (Toronto), Alexander Alberro (Columbia), Joel Snyder (Chicago), WJT Mitchell (Chicago), Blake Stimson (UC Davis), Kaja Silverman (Penn). These are the scholars that come to the top of my mind. As far as I know they're all tenured and accepting (or have accepted) PhD students. I am definitely overlooking quite a few scholars, particularly newer ones. It would probably be useful as well to look for scholars outside of Art History programs, like Azoulay (Modern Media and Culture/Comp. Lit) and Cadava (English/Comp. Lit/IHum).

As a permanent faculty member now? Has this been officially confirmed?

Have you tried looking outside of the Art History department at the Ivy. Suppose there is a fantastic faculty member in languages or comparative lit, who is able to serve as a co-supervisor or committee member. You may end up producing better work if you have a supervisor working with Western modern/contemporary art, and then another working with the art/literature/cultural history of your geographical area of interest. Really I would say that you should go to the Ivy, find a committee member/co-supervisor outside of the Art History department, and take the extra $5000 a year. I know, for example, that it's mandatory in Art History at Berkeley for doctoral students to have a committee member outside of the department. Obviously this is not a deciding factor, but I think it's one of the reasons that students from the department produce some of the most interesting new work in the field.

Eisenstein for dat montage!

:3 Picasso and Truth coming soon!

Lol at reading Seriously, this. Obviously it's helpful to be able to cross-reference between German and English, but the only Benjamin you need to read in German is the untranslated stuff. It's a waste of your time to try to read all of Freud, Marx, the Frankfurt School etc—especially before grad school. In addition, there are so many theorists missing from Cleisthenes' list. You could very well add Spivak, Said, Althusser, Gramsci, de Man, Weber, Habermas, Fanon, Husserl, Gadamer, any of the autonomists, Butler, Sontag, Wittgenstein, Laplanche, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, Bataille, Sloterdijk, Latour, Badiou, Bakhtin, Shklovsky etc. That doesn't include earlier philosophers, even—all of the aforementioned thinkers are 20th century. One could very well start another list, with everything from Schiller to Riegl. My point is that one could very well put together another list of thinkers comparable to that posted by Cleisthenes', and claim that they are necessary reading. Yet, it is humorous to think of Derrida confessing to have never read Wittgenstein—particularly because he did not have the time to grapple with him properly. I think the same can be said about anyone wanting to go to graduate school. Deal with what you are able to properly grapple with, and with what is particularly pertinent to your sub-field. P.S. Interesting that Cleisthenes' list is almost entirely void of thinkers of gender/race/sexuality, no? Would produce a very white-washed, heteronormative, patriarchal Art History. P.P.S. As soon as you start considering things mandatory, you will become a raging lunatic. New theoretical fields with vital texts pop up every now and then, and you're sure as hell not going to be able to run around trying to learn Affect Theory, OOO and world-systems theory. If you try that you'll end up producing shit scholarship. P.P.P.S. Literature rocks too. Frank O'Hara can tell you as much about AbEx as any theorist. Try it.

As a Canadian, I can say that the majority of tenure-track jobs here are actually going to candidates from top American schools now... :/

If your area is Modern/Contemporary or Northwest Coast Indigenous go to UBC; Serge Guilbaut, John O'Brian, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, and Jaleh Mansoor are all badass. There is also a very active curatorial program (which I don't think is matched by anything offered at U of T or McGill) and a lot of the MA and PhD students take the curatorial studies courses. In other cases however, I would go to McGill or Toronto. UBC doesn't really have an early modernist at the moment, and isn't a particularly strong department for Medieval or Classical art. There are some really cool scholars in Asian Studies if you're working on Asian art/material culture, but by and large the Art History department isn't particularly stellar in that area either.

I think the standard now if you want a tenure track job anywhere is to be damn exceptional

I'm having trouble understanding your obsession with your "field." Is it because you're afraid of being at a disadvantage in the case that you apply to programs outside of it? I don't want this to sound like an attack or anything, but I think you should let go of rigid ideas of "field." Obviously there are some more conservative Art History and English programs that do adhere to the idea, but there are also many programs that fully expect cross-disciplinary work. It seems like a lot of what you're afraid of is based on presumptions that don't necessarily apply, like the idea of English programs being "strictly interested in scholars focusing on words over art." To add on to this, I would be careful about making the assumptions that a) "traditional" programs are more likely to lead you to further career opportunities, and you're better equipped to enter "traditional" programs, as they're just as competitive as "non-traditional programs." Doctoral programs in Chinese art, for example, are going to want reading knowledge in at least two asian languages—you may need to pick up Japanese again. American programs aren't necessarily going to have the same language requirements, but they're going to be competitive as well. Why not drop the obsession with "traditional fields" and look at more interdisciplinary programs? Brown and NYU have super cool media studies programs, Berkeley Rhetoric, Stanford Modern Thought and Lit, UCI and UCSC Visual Studies... potentially American Studies programs? Even the English programs you seem to dread can be quite interdisciplinary. For some reason you seem to have decided your initial research interests aren't "viable," even though there are so many potentially fantastic programs.