dr. t

Yeah, I think that the best way to think of your quantifiables on a PhD app is as if you're applying to a top-tier undergraduate institution. Every year, UChicago (for example) gets enough applicants with perfect GPA and SAT scores to fill out an entire freshman class; every PhD program worth attending can certainly do the same, mutas mutandis. What else can you bring to the table to stand out from the crowd? If you don't have that perfect GPA (I didn't), why, specifically, should the admissions committee take you over a candidate who does?

Yeah, it depends a lot. American medievalists frequently place in British universities, but, in what I can only call a massive fulfillment of stereotype, the French only really hire the French for such positions. Germany seems to come somewhere in between - German academic networking and production is pretty different from the American model. A lot of universities in southeast Asia with English as the primary language of instruction are looking for European/American academics, and I have a couple of friends who went that route. In general, the wider you cast your net, the more likely it is you'll find something, but there's still nothing even close to a guarantee that the something will be any good.

Yeah, a lot of state schools in particular have gone from 40+ to ~25; I think 10 for a full (40+ tenured) department is about where it should be.

Our disagreement was over, and I quote, that This remains false. It may help to clarify matters if I were to say that I would certainly count places like UChicago and Stanford as Ivies, despite the fact that the lack the technical classification.

Again, particular instances don't really have much to say to aggregate data. I'm not saying that many lower-tier schools don't look askance at Ivy applicants. I'm saying it doesn't matter in the big picture. Look, one of the places I heard that sales pitch was from Ohio State. Now, as I said in that other thread, Ohio State is actually really good at placing its students at lower-ranked institutions. Circa 2015, they had a grand total of 8 junior faculty placements, but they're taking cohorts of 25. If we do some rough math and say that it's unlikely that any hire remains at the assistant professor rank for more than 7 years (the standard for tenure, and assuming associate rank comes with tenure), then OSU - which targets the exact type of jobs you're talking about - has managed to place 1 student a year, more or less, out of 25. 4% of each cohort lands a TT job at something above the community college level. Doing the same calculation for Harvard, which has been taking cohorts of about 15-20 (let's say 20), sees 10 of that 20 placed in junior faculty positions, or 50% of each cohort. That's still terrible odds for 6-8 years of your life. The numbers are brutal, and you're kidding yourself if you think they aren't, or that you can do better if you just set your sights lower.

Yes. I was talking about my teaching load as a graduate student. And yet they keep getting the jobs. Feel free to keep arguing general trends from particular circumstances if you want, but it's not a particularly sound way to think about structural problems.

Just to drive this home, the top-10 schools for placements granted PhDs to 52% of the assistant professors (i.e. junior faculty) as of 2015. The distribution goes down hill rapidly from there - schools 11-20 account for 21%, 21-30 for 12%, 31-40 for 5%, and the remaining 10% divided up between 46 schools. 60 PhD-granting institutions have no junior faculty placements whatsoever. The institutional hiring curve is quite literally exponential.

Alas, the numbers simply don't back this up. And I know you've seen the numbers, because they're in nice graphs in that other thread. I've heard the "Ivy grads want too much and can't teach" line before, always from people trying to recruit me to come to a state school and trying to convince me that the fact that I'll have a 1/2 load and be IoR from my second semester is a good thing I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. (All Ivies aren't created equal - HYPr > BPnCD)

Peter Brown hasn't been taking students at Princeton for years. And that's kind of the point - you're focusing on who's doing good scholarship while this study is looking at whose students are getting hired. The former has little to do with the latter, and the simple fact that twice as many Harvard history PhDs have TT jobs when compared to Princeton tells you something about those programs.

According to the study's authors, they reflect prestige, which is why network centrality is the metric of choice. If you're like, say, UMich, and have a lot of students placing at a variety of different schools, it ranks you higher. But similarly, if you're able to place a few students at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, like Brandeis, you also get ranked higher. Anecdotally, as someone who's gone to grad school at two Ivies at different levels of the prestige scale (Harvard and Brown), there is little difference in terms of quality of instruction. This is substantially different than my undergrad experience, where the instructors at Harvard - even its night school - were markedly better than the ones I had at either UMass or BU. However, Harvard's prestige, coupled with its financial clout, makes it notably different when it comes to networking. Just as one example, here at Brown we have a visiting scholar come and give a small talk on their latest project once a month or so - usually either a mid-level prof or someone higher ranked who has a personal relationship with a faculty member. At Harvard, this happened every week, and it was always very senior figures who came. If you wanted, you could join them for dinner after, gratis. It would be foolish to think this does not have an impact on Harvard's placement rate. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 'rank' of the school you attend has little relationship to your raw intelligence, as far as that's a concept that even makes sense. It will, however, have a massive impact on the work you produce, through the support (financial and intellectual) you have when producing it and the networks you develop which foster its impact.

Finally, looking at assistant professors only, we see that, while Harvard and Yale hold their space, UCBerk, Princeton, and Stanford have recently been suffering, but that UChicago, Columbia, and UMich have been doing well. UT Austin (#29) is also punching well above its weight, though in terms of placements, it certainly looks "mid-range". Schools that have had at least 10 recent hires are, in order: Harvard (70), UChicago (56), Yale (47), Columbia (47), UCBerk (36), UMich (35), Princeton (32), Stanford (29), UPenn (25), UCLA (25), UWisc (24), NYU (22), UNC (17), JHU (16), UT-Austin (16), Cornell (15), Northwestern (14), Rutgers (13), UCSD (12), Emory (11), and Brown (10). Note these numbers are not weighted for cohort size. The way Harvard dominates these data is just nuts.

The data are available for download, so according to that, Rochester has been the degree-granting institution for 20 tenured professors: 1 at Harvard, 2 at Columbia, 2 at Johns Hopkins, 1 at UCLA, 2 at NYU, 1 at Rutgers, 1 at UI (Urbana-Champ), 1 at Georgetown, 1 at UMaryland, 1 at Ohio State, 1 at UI (Chicago), 1 at LSU, 1 at Ohio University, 1 at Houston, 2 at UOklahoma, and 1 at Northeastern. The data are not limited in temporal scope. It simply includes all current professors, and this is indeed a problem. It does, however differentiate between "assistant," "associate" and "full", which is not a strict temporal division, but is helpful. Rochester only has 3 current graduates who are not 'full'; all are associate professors: at Georgetown, UMaryland, and UOklahoma. If you count the number of active tenured professors by the schools they attended, the graph looks like this: Or if you look at only recent appointments (exclude full profs) it looks like: You can see that Rochester has had a particularly bad run for its rank, and that Brandeis has its position by placing very few people in excellent positions. Note also that tOSU (#57) is punching well above its weight in terms of sheer numbers - placing a lot of its students at less prestigious institutions. In either case, the overall fall-off after UCLA (#13) is insane, and after UI (U-C) (#33) catastrophic.

Yeah, that's why the above study is so intriguing. It's mapping network centrality of nodes, with edges determined by where a school places their students, i.e. who gets hired where. The more central the node, the better they are at placing more of their students at other nodes. According to this, you can see that the top-2 are fairly close, then the next 3-4, and then it starts rapidly decreasing from there. According to the full study, attending a school outside the top 15% (about 20 schools - for history, network centrality decreases rapidly after #19 - NYU) is not wise outside of very specific subfields if you want a TT job. # u cent institution 1 1.54 Harvard University 2 2.41 Yale University 3 4.8 UC Berkeley 4 5.16 Princeton University 5 5.45 Stanford University 6 6.19 University of Chicago 7 7 Columbia University [8 9.97 Brandeis University] 9 10.84 Johns Hopkins University 10 11.66 University of Pennsylvania 11 11.85 "University of Wisconsin, Madison" 12 13.94 University of Michigan 13 14.01 UCLA 14 15.65 Northwestern University 15 17.39 Cornell University 16 17.74 Brown University 17 18.46 UC Davis 18 18.69 University of Rochester 19 20.44 New York University

Well, eighth. But that's not so much the product of an odd set-up as it is the fact that Brandeis is (or was) very good at placing scholars from certain sub-disciplines (Jewish history) into certain important nodes, giving it a high degree of network centrality. I certainly wouldn't go there if you wanted to study premodern China.

If you want to go the PH route, look more towards journalism than academics for inspiration (Fussell, for example, was originally training for journalism).

Relevant article: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 TL;DR: 1 1.54 5 1 Northeast Harvard University 2 2.41 1 12 Northeast Yale University 3 4.80 1 14 West UC Berkeley 4 5.16 1 1 Northeast Princeton University 5 5.45 1 9 West Stanford University 6 6.19 5 4 Midwest University of Chicago 7 7.00 7 10 Northeast Columbia University 8 9.97 36 7 Northeast Brandeis University (particularly strong in very specific subfields) 9 10.84 9 3 South Johns Hopkins University 10 11.66 9 3 Northeast University of Pennsylvania

Also, re: musing styles, I would take a look at the work of Paul Fussell, particularly The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell is British-trained, and definitely muses (his work is more literary criticism than history than l'histoire proprement dite), but his musing is concise, and always drives to a point. For example, Fussell argues that trench warfare killed the romantic epic; the reality of trench warfare would not allow it. There was a collision “…between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate [them]… Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there’s no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works.” Compare this to what you've written, and see how Fussell's "musing" and bloody digression only serves to further the precise point he wants to make, that the First World War caused a crisis of literary expression, a crisis that writing about warfare had hitherto not encountered. This musing drives the point home more quickly and concisely than any long, dusty academic exegesis could.

If Dutch citizenship or a public history job is what you want from a PhD, then OK - nolo contendere. For the latter, though, you should really start thinking about publicly-accessible prose styles. Contemporary academic work has a purpose. It's no longer considered sufficient, either in the US or Europe, to simply know something, to merely accumulate facts as a self-evident good. As I keep repeating, much to my students' despair, yeah, that's true; so what? And that requires engagement beyond the narrow confines of "Dutch history", at least as you've constructed it.

If you need to do this for one language, that's acceptable - you can nail a reading proficiency in French in a year with little difficulty. To do it with three, or with languages which are harder to learn (Latin, German)? No. The broader point is that it's not really cost-effective to do language training at an MA program, since taking a language course will always be at the expense of doing higher level coursework. Better to spend $1k and do that bit at community college.

An MA is, as I said, a place to shore up weak language skills. It's not a place to acquire them. Modernists/Americanists usually get away without serious language study, but proficiency in multiple languages is the key to the production of quality scholarship on medieval Europe. Competent reading ability in Latin, French, and German is a minimum realistic requirement. Unless you're a savant, that means at minimum 3-4 years of Latin and a 1 year reading-focused program in the other two. And although there are programs that do not mandate language study for their premodern applicants, I would strongly encourage you not to apply to them - they are more interested in you as a way to get all their classes taught than as a developing scholar. If you currently have "little to no" language skills, then I would discourage you from applying to any graduate-level program until you spend the time to acquire them. Until you do, you will not be able to access either the primary or secondary literature in order to create a strong research project, or even a passable writing sample. To put it another way, if you don't have competent Latin, you haven't yet actually done medieval history; why do you want to go to grad school for it?

Hal would (and does) say that he wrote a history that happens to involve economies, and I think Lindemann would say much the same. But I would certainly pay attention to such trends, particularly, in light of @Calgacus' comment, in the ways in which both Lindemann and Cook's books reach outside of the Low Countries. Jobs are scarce, Early Modern Europe isn't exactly a growth industry even in the terrible context of academia, and I can't remember the last time I saw a Job posting for a Dutch historian. But rather than thinking of this as a temporary abnormality, consider why this is. If you want to "promote" the subfield, are there historiographic reasons why no one is currently interested in it?

An MA is only necessary if you have some aspect of your application you need to shore up - weak language skills, little independent research, bad freshman year grades. If you're not trying to fix one of these things, don't pay out money for an MA. I would discourage you from USF or ASU. The premodern job market is particularly tough right now, and these schools will not be helpful there. Also, all your schools are reach schools. There's no such thing as a safe bet in PhD apps.

Same - it usually takes about 10-15 hours of my week (plus showering and data crunching and eating ALL THE FOOD). I had to give it up cold turkey to do prelims, though. I've gained 15 pounds in 3 months, and can't wait for the holiday break.

Really? Hal Cook's Matters of Exchange and Mary Lindemann's The Merchant Republics seem to me to be pretty recent (and important, and popular) works of Dutch history.