Mercyhurst2010

When I was applying to PhD programs, the advice I was given (which has borne out so far) was--grads from top 10/20 programs compete for all the research oriented jobs. Everybody else competes for the teaching jobs at 4-year and regional state schools. In that sense, it doesn't always matter if you are coming from U of Maryland (ranked in the 30s) or U of Kentucky (ranked in the 80s); what you do while you are in the program (if there's anything meritocratic about the system at all) will far outway the letterhead your recommendation letters are printed on. Meanwhile, there are plenty of programs in the "63 and below" category that place students in TT jobs at a much higher rate than some top 10s, because many small 4-years and state regionals assume that an Ivy PhD wants a research job and will merely use the first gig as a stepping stone. What I wonder about, given the way R1 jobs are going mostly to top-10, some to 11-35, the occasional job to a 36-62, and (from anything I've seen) virtually none to anyone below that threshold, is how much who your advisor is and where you publish (if you publish) factor into the equation. For example -- say you are in a small, low-ranked PhD program, but your advisor makes a big name for him/herself and you manage to publish one or two articles in really high quality journals (of the Representations, PMLA, ALH, New Literary History, etc. variety). Obviously this is an extraordinary rare and difficult scenario--but might good publications and a strong advisor (the things that are really supposed to matter in grad school) counteract the ranking bias when R1 programs, especially those in the upper crust, are hiring for a position? All other things being equal, if a search committee at Brown or UC Davis is sifting through applications and see a U of Kentucky graduate with articles in ELH and Twentieth Century Literature, and a Princeton graduate with either no publications or, perhaps, one article in a very small journal or a book chapter through a minor press, is the U of K grad now at least on equal footing with the Princeton grad for the job? Or would the elite R1s never stoop below the top 35 regardless of the applicants "peripherals," as the baseball scouts would say? I assume nobody here has an answer for this, but it's something I'd be interested in hearing opinions on, as there seems to be a tendency to align top-tier publishing with top-tier pedigree, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. (By the way, all schools named randomly just for the sake of discussion--I have no affiliation with any of them.)

You might also consider my institution, Case Western Reserve University. I have not worked with her myself (very different interests) but Martha Woodmansee is well known in literature / law circles. She may be the most nationally known member of Case's faculty, and she holds a joint appointment in the English department and the Law school.

I'm curious if anyone more knowledgeable than me in these matters could help with a question I have been pondering the past couple days. I have been putting together my checklists, looking at the CV's of accomplished faculty (to see what they did while still in grad school, especially), and thinking about what I want to expand my experience as an academic to supplement the routine tasks of whatever program I end up attending (ie--coursework, teaching, departmental functions, etc). One item that seems to come up often, but that I know very little about, is applying for grant money for research and travel related to research. Does anyone know of any good resources for this? Obviously, for people late in their studies or, more often, early in their careers after school, the NEH and the Mellon Foundation are top choices. But are there external, non-departmental resources I could be looking into now, as an incoming PhD student, or during the first couple years while I'm finishing up coursework? I imagine this is a subject that others have thought about as well, so I figured I'd get this discussion going. Has anyone received any interesting advice where this is concerned?

Great question, and one that I've asked myself hundreds of times. I think what keeps me interested in this discourse, though, is that one can pick up almost any novel from any historical period (particularly since the Enlightenment) and analyze, in very interesting ways, the overlap between religious and secular ideology, symbolism, politics, etc. Additionally, the rise of literary criticism as a discipline owes much to the emphasis on developing scholarly methodologies for the study of sacred texts, particularly in Reformation-era Protestantism. (Hermeneutics, for instance, is a word often attributed to biblical exegesis just as regularly as it is to phenomenological strains of philosophy.) Then there's the fact that so many of the world's religions have developed around narrative and text, and that religion and literature both invite interpretive and imaginative engagement with the world, in stark contrast to the reductive positivism prevalent within a largely technology-and-market driven society. So, in many ways, I think one could easily make the case that religion and literature are like estranged cousins--unique to each other and yet sharing the similarities that emerge out of a common ancestry, so to speak--and that an interdisciplinary reintegration of the two would do much to invigorate both fields. While I have no pretension to imagine that the current work I am interested in right now will have any more staying power than any other movement in theory, I do think that the issues such a study takes up have the capacity to be replenished with renewed vigor with each new wave of theoretical innovation.

I read a little bit of Animal Studies, Thing Theory, etc. in a theory course during my MA. Honestly, I don't really know how much staying power these fields have. I think one thing we all have to think about as we're planning our specialization is whether or not that field will still be relevant 10, 20 years from now. Obviously no one does Structuralism anymore. That was 50+ years ago. But to teach theory, you have to know Structuralism. Will the same be true of Animal Studies when we've been out of grad school and (hopefully...) on the path to tenure a decade from now? Maybe, and for those who are interested in it, I hope so! But count me as one who is a bit skeptical. As for what's "hot" in English, religion and literature is not exactly a "hot" topic. But there are some rockstar scholars (i.e. - Amy Hungerford at Yale, John McClure at Rutgers) and philosophers (Richard Kearney at BC, who studied under Ricoeur, John Caputo who is closely connected to Derrida, etc.) who are driving at some interesting theoretical approaches to the relationship between religious discourse / religious studies and literary artifacts. It's a turn in the interdisciplinary direction that I think might be very promising. It worked (reasonably well, I guess) in my PhD applications?

Still waiting on Penn State, Colorado, Missouri, and Louisiana State. Penn State tends to send late rejections, I know, and at this point I'm not holding my breath for anything otherwise. I have no idea what is going on with Colorado. They notified some PhD acceptances and rejections a week before I got most of the offers I received from other programs. They're basically out of the running, anyway, even if I get an offer, but it would at least be nice to know! Louisiana State seems to have just started notifying, so I'm not too worried about them. But Missouri? They gave a couple fellowship offers in early Feb, it seems, but beyond that--silence. Surprising, too, because when I completed my application I received an email stating I would know my status by March 1. Oh well. At this point, I'm choosing from offers to programs that are better than (with the exception of PSU) what I'm still waiting on.

Great place to be with an interest in Flannery O'Connor, right? Congrats! I hope you get funding!

And everything pretty much stayed the same. Well, that was anticlimactic. Not that these ranking systems matter all that much! Still, it would have been nice to see if any of these programs have reshuffled dramatically since the last rankings, which came out in 2009. I honestly get the impression that the people who were surveyed for these rankings just looked at the 2009 rankings and re-organized them. You would think, given how vastly the 2009 US News rankings differed from the NRC rankings, that there would be a lot more variation here, especially considering how arbitrary the process of ranking doctoral programs in the humanities really is! http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/english-rankings Am I missing something? Does anyone see any programs that they applied to shifting dramatically either up or down? Mine all pretty much stayed put. EDIT: Pitt seems to have fallen quite a bit. Down to 39. Wasn't it in the upper 20s previously? Or did I imagine that?

I had one of them. In off the wait list. Really surprised!

Just received a call from Professor Ray offering me admission off the wait list! I'm really excited about this one. I had written it off as a rejection. Unfortunately, due to the late notice I can't get off work for the campus visit day next week. Whoever goes to that, please give the rest of us a detailed report when you get back! I'm really interested in learning more about the overall culture of the department, the (on the ground, vs on the website) sense among students about their job placement prospects, and I guess just how happy students currently in the program seem to be. I really wish I could visit...stupid temp job with no vacation time keeping me nailed firmly to Pittsburgh!

I was in a similar position. I finished a MA program last May, and was not planning on applying to PhD programs this cycle. Instead, my wife and I were going to be teaching English abroad for a year. Well, we were gone for a month and for a variety of reasons our stay was cut short, and we came home in early October. Within a few weeks, I got the itch, and began applying to PhD programs with my old (2009) GRE scores and no time to study for or take the subject test. I really threw together my list, though, and had I allowed myself more than a month to whip out thirteen applications, I might have had the sense to at least consider the possibility that programs on the US News top 20 wouldn't require the subject test. I saw so many that required it that I just looked in the 25-85 range and looked from programs that looked like a good fit. If given the opportunity to apply again (which would be silly, since I'm already quite happy with the offers I've received) I would definitely apply to Brown, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Emory. (Emory I botched simply because I missed the deadline. I was down to the wire on the Dec. 8 / Dec. 15 programs, and oops, Emory was Dec. 1!)

Keep in mind also that the job market is a total crap-shoot, and while an "elite" program may give you an outside chance of being hired by an elite university when you're on the job market (a chance those of us outside the top-20 likely will never have), the 4-year liberal arts colleges and state universities (where most of the jobs are) often tend to see job candidates from top-5 / top-10 schools as riskier to hire. This, at least, was the experience of a few of my PhD student colleagues who went on the job market while I was in my MA program. No joke, there have been a couple years where, by the "percentages," Case Western (which is unlikely to break "top 50" in the admittedly arbitrary ranking system) did a better job of placing graduates in tenure track work than many schools in the Ivy League. Granted, the Yale grads getting jobs were getting them at places like Hopkins while the Case grads were getting jobs in low-enrollment colleges in rural southern towns, but if the goal is primarily to get a job, you're honestly better off looking at the amount of support the individual department provides for the job hunt, regardless of its rank, and ignoring the fanciness of the letter-head on which you'll be sending your application materials. Just my two cents, anyway. There are lots of so-called "2nd tier" graduate programs where every graduate in the past 4-5 years who conducted a national job search is working as a full time lecturer or better, just as there are lots of elite top 10 schools with half a dozen recent grads trying to scrape something together on the adjunct mill. Everything you do in this profession is a risk, and it is impossible to make your position more secure by climbing the ladder of university prestige. With all that being said, if I had an offer from CUNY and nothing holding me back from attending, the only reason I would turn it down would be another offer from a program with a better fit in this application cycle.

Two more responses today! (Wow, it's been a busy week.) Accepted at Duquesne, and received a really lovely voicemail (followed by a subsequent phone convo) with the DGS. It's a great little program that seems to be doing a lot of things right, and some of the students I've met from this program seem quite happy. I'm a little leery about the job prospects at such a small program, though, as I imagine it's not going to be as nationally known as some of my other offers. Also, I finally got my official rejection from Notre Dame. I knew it was coming, since I wasn't one of the people given interviews. Nice to finally make that official, I suppose. 3 acceptances in the past 4 days! I'm feeling great about this.

Accepted with full funding at University of Iowa!!! This is a difficult one. On one hand, this is one of the best places for "fit" of anywhere I applied. There's a lot of great people doing American literature there, there's a faculty member doing religion & lit stuff, and Marilynne Robinson (my favorite contemporary novelist--my writing sample, which I'm hoping to publish, is on her novels) teaches at the Writers Workshop. On the other hand, the location couldn't be less of a fit, as my wife and I have made moving to an area where she will also find work in her field a top priority. Although I'm not making any final decisions about any offers until more of the results come in (and until I've had time to process), there's a very high likelihood that I would turn this offer down for other opportunities. Still, it feels great to be accepted to such a good program, and regardless of the final choice I think I will certainly use this acceptance as a launch-point to attempt a bit of networking with faculty at Iowa who work in my field!

This is basically where I'm at with the offer from UK. I would be fine with a 2/2, in theory. When I was doing my MA, it was 2/1 during my first year but the incoming DGS got it reduced to 1/1 during my second year. Part of the issue, though, is that a LOT of PhD students I knew in my MA (and I'm sure this is fairly prevalent) either adjuncted 1 class a semester at another local institution (small 4 year colleges & community colleges) to help pay the bills, or else they found additional work (maybe 10 hrs / wk) within the university. For example, at Case there are a few English PhD students who teach a spoken English / presentation skills course that's required for new international TA's who score lower on spoken English proficiency tests. With a 1/1 (or even a 2/1) teaching load, taking on outside work for additional funding is entirely doable. But when it's 2/2, and the stipend is significantly lower than most other programs, that's tough. Of course, a big factor in my decision making will be finding what works best for both me and my wife. She's in special education, and the prevailing wisdom is that there are more teaching jobs available in the south. (There certainly are none in Western PA!) So if she found a really good job in Lexington, then the lower stipend would be less of an issue. Anyway, I've still got that wait-list spot at WashU (which is very high on my list), and I'm not not yet halfway through hearing back from all my applications. So who knows where this could all end up!