dr. t

What? No. I would put it up, particularly if you have no plan of turning it into articles.

Specific MAs in medieval studies may be taken at Western Michigan, Oxbridge, Fordham, UCLA, UToronto, UCLondon, and some others which I have forgotten. To my knowledge, Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley do not offer MAs in medieval studies except en route to a PhD. You sound like a strong candidate for PhD work. Why are you looking at an MA?

As you rightly say, you can look across departments and see that some are losing chairs in certain specific subfields due to retirement, buyouts, etc., and those vacancies are not being filled. Sometimes this is balanced by positions being created elsewhere across the discipline, other times it is not. The latter case constitutes a net loss of positions, and, although I don't wish to put words into Sigaba's mouth, I believe that is the point of his or her statement.

That's a bit sad, isn't it

Based on recent AHA numbers, approximately 50% of history PhDs who graduated in the past 10 years have a TT job, 25% are still on the market, and 25% are no longer seeking. A postdoc seems to be a fairly standard part of the process. More precise numbers vary with subdiscipline and graduating institution.

This thread is perhaps not a fantastic piece of advice on how to behave at conferences, but it is a stunning example of how conferences sometimes go.

I agree with GeoDUDE. This seems like a vital piece of the story.

But how am I going to win the Bulwyer-Lytton contest with fit and trim prose? (Great website, thanks!)

Anything that you put on the internet can and will be traced back to you. No point in behaving otherwise.

You seem to have decided that I can't use this forum as a place to vent my own insecurity AND be "wired in" at the same time. I would not agree. Not sure what the Extension School has to do with that, either; perhaps you can elucidate that point. I would not argue that the world described by Blum or Winks was incorrect, but I would say that it is, in both cases, dated by at least 10 (but really closer to 30-40) years. Of course "Machiavellian" is my word. That's pretty clear from both sentence structure and context. That's not me "putting words in your posts", that's me letting you know how you've come across. This is my point from the start: there are interpersonal politics at an Ivy, like the rest of academia, and it is often hard to separate those politics from unwritten rules of behavior, etc., which is where this thread started. Your professors are going to be very good at those politics; it's a large part of how they got where they are. I think we basically agree up to this point. My objection is that I have not seen evidence of this sort of thing among the graduate students. I suggested against looking at the sources you offered because I think they would give the wrong idea whatever they said. Go to school, be yourself, learn by doing. Don't worry about how you're supposed to be acting according to some external source.

A keen sense of the obvious is also an important ability every graduate student must master

I don't think it's particularly productive to go back through that point by point. It's mainly getting caught up in details and, specifically with respect to tone and reading comprehension, I think it's quite possible neither of us is conveying precisely what we want. It boils down to this: at this point, I have spent five years in various roles at an Ivy league (the Ivy league?) university, as an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a research assistant to three different professors, inter alia. A nice brag, yes, but I want to make clear where I'm coming from when I say that the world you described in your original post had hints of familiarity but the overall sense you convey is, based on my experience, incorrect. The depiction you gave seems to posit world that is significantly more Machiavellian than the one I have encountered. This may indeed be due in part to differences between various historical fields - I don't think the job market is as harsh on medievalists as it has been on other parts of the humanities. However, I've not seen it in my encounters here with people outside my immediate interests, either. So, that being the case, what has lead you to construct the narrative above?

This seems a bit over the top, in my experience. Point by point: YMMV.

Yeah I realized after I posted that the OP was 6 months old and nothing would come of it. FWIW, he won me over by calling Foucault nasty names.

Levenson? Really? I've not encountered anyone, including PhD students, who have expressed anything negative about him, and I have a fairly favorable impression of him myself. I think you should explain at least a little bit more.

The big one: don't go over your allotted time.

Not having languages will hurt your application, without a doubt. All the master's programs I listed above save WMU do offer good students substantial funding packages. For example, I am currently receiving about $20k in grants from HDS to cover $25k tuition. Chicago's MAPSS program offered me half tuition.

Oof. That's unfortunate.

If you check the pre-reg site, you'll see that it's required for MDivs but not MTS.

I know! I went to talk to him the summer before my last application round (so, summer 2012) and he said that he was not taking any new students because he was going to retire in 3 years (so I guess after this year?).

Start going (and presenting) as soon as you can. This is not just so you can get feedback on your own ideas or network. The most important thing conferences allow you to do is practice giving presentations. Given the importance of the campus visit in the job hunt, conferences are a rare opportunity to practice this vital skill. So: do not wait for things to come across your desk. Be proactive and aggressive in seeking out conference opportunities and travel funding. This will also, coincidentally, force you to write and research more.

I would not say British history is so much falling out of vogue as it is turning more towards archaeology, particularly for late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. That said, I agree, the best professors for the subject are in the UK, which has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Sorry, I meant that list as a way to get a sense of the field, not necessarily as specific professors to investigate. Brown is not taking students, Noble is retiring (retired?) as well.

Latin, French, and German reading proficiency is required by the end of your first year at pretty much every decent program. If you can't pass the UToronto Level 1 Latin Exam pretty much right now (it's kind of the default standard, and they have samples online) and you are applying for this (or even next) fall, you are in serious trouble. Not impossible, but it's a major blow before the process even starts. Languages are (IMHO) the most vital technical skill a medievalist can possess. The vast majority of people you would want to study with are in the UK, but I would look at (in no particular order) some of the works of Michael McCormick, Albrecht Diem, Peter L. Brown, Rosamund McKitterick, Thomas Noble, Christopher Loveluck, Ian Wood, and Paul Fouracre, among others. I would also read through some of the recent issues of Speculum and Viator to see who's publishing articles that interest you. Also, check out some or all of these books and see who they're citing and who interests you. Davis, Jennifer R., Michael McCormick, Angeliki E. Laiou, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Herbert L. Kessler, eds. The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Brown, Warren, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam J. Kosto, eds. Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. McKitterick, Rosamond. The Early Middle Ages: Europe 400-1000. The Short Oxford History of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Richards, Jeffrey. The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476-752. London: Routledge, 1979. Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A.D. 300-900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. If your linguistic skills are not great, I would also look at the MA degrees being offered by Fordham, UTorronto, Oxbridge, and Western Michigan, as well as the MTS at Harvard Divinity School and the MAPSS at UChicago as ways to get up to snuff.

Oh you clever scallywag. Truly, you have entrapped me in a web of words.