dr. t

Fair. Poking around the internet I found this, too http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/645940-harvard-divinity-school.html See you in 3 weeks :-)

Also if you're lucky, your library has overhead book scanners. Best. Invention. Ever.

Well it's a really fun word to say.

In terms of content, The King's Two Bodies, above. In terms of style, anything by Peter Brown. Good Luck!

If you notice, ThD is a separate item on the list at 9.5%

Just to nitpick, this thread it as 27% form MTS/MDiv. I assuming the latter brings that average up, but for 40 to be right, the MTS rate would have to be pretty low indeed.

Theologically conservative, I don't know. I think you'd get a lot of good arguments. Socially conservative, yeah, not the place for you. I don't think you'd get a huge amount of pushback, you just would alienate a large percentage of your peers.

Cool cool cool. The language bit was just an FYI about something which had surprised me, although I had looked early enough. Italian would depend on where you really wanted to research. For economic stuff you'd certainly need it, the Italian city states being what they are. Not so much with studying religion in general though; everyone wrote everything in Latin. Since you're in New England I'd point out that Harvard Extension School offers French and Spanish for Reading on an alternating year basis, and Professor Thomas, the George Martin Lane Professor for the Classics and Harvard College Professor, offers intermediate classical Latin courses every semester (prose in the Fall and poetry in the Spring). This is how I assembled some of my language skill. Trade is not necessarily purely quantitative. I would recommend McCormick iste above, although it's quite a tome, as a great way to see several approaches with that respect. I personally study high to late medieval intellectual and cultural history, and specifically focus on the interplay between the religious and secular. My master's thesis is on a Cistercian foundation in the north of France ca. 1200 and how it shaped a community identity in response to the broader social and intellectual milieu, which is to say the universities and the crusades. As for hot topics, the current fad is "materiality", although I think that one is subsiding rather than growing at this point. Women's history is at a weird point where I think there might be a bit of a lull between second and third wave feminist influences. Within my own experience, which is strongly influenced by the professors I work with, there is a growing tendency towards recognizing that medieval history cannot be a purely textual field. Archeological, climatological, and microbiological approaches are being incorporated with increasing frequency. I can also say that Byzantine history is not very popular right now, with several universities having their resident Byzantinist retire and not replaced. As someone who just went through an app cycle, the field is really strange in general. All the current greats - Carolyn Walker Byrnum, Peter Brown, Beverley Kienzle, Thomas Noble, Bernard McGinn, to name a few - are retiring or retired, and it's not really very clear where the new lights are, yet. I'm also not overly confident in my analysis, and hope someone else chimes in If you want a larger reading list, I can PM you the whole syllabus. It's about 90 books

If you really want to incorporate Chinese, I'd start looking at economic history in general and the Indian Ocean trade routes specifically. Good intro description here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6XtBLDmPA0 . Things to read (taken from the syllabus of a course I just finished which was essentially Generals prep): -Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. New York: Norton, 1939. -Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God; a Study of Monastic Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 1961. -Smalley, Beryl. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. NDP 39. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964. -Classen, Peter. Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde: diplomatische Studien zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter. Vyzantina keimena kai meletai 15. Thessalonikē: Kentron Vyzantinōn Ereunōn, 1977. -Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Ed. rev. et corr. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. -Powell, James M., ed. Medieval Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1992. -Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig. The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton Paperbacks. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997. -Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. Augustine of Hippo: a Biography. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Second edition is important here) -McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A.D. 300-900. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. -Philippart, Guy, and Michel Trigalet. “‘L’hagiographie Latine Du XIesiècle Dans La Longue Durée: Données Statistiques Sur La Production Littéraire et Sur L’édition Médiévale.” In Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies, Cambridge, September 9-12, 1998, edited by Michael W. Herren, Christopher James McDonough, and Ross Gilbert Arthur, 281–301. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 5. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. -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, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co, 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. -Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307. 3rd ed. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. -Kienzle, Beverly Mayne. Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229: Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard. Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press/Boydell Press, 2001. -Kieckhefer, Richard. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. -Tellenbach, Gerd. Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 27. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1991. -Head, Thomas, ed. Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology. New York ; London: Routledge, 2001. -Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. I have a larger list if you want One thing I would mention that is not immediately apparent to many, but may become obvious from this list, is that language skill is the most important aspect of medieval study. Regardless of program, you will need a solid grasp on Latin, French, and German. If you want to specialize elsewhere, you will need to add specific languages to the list. You've been warned

That saddens me, a bit.

Crap. Or yay? It strikes me that the above is a fairly concise yet accurate summary of graduate school in general.

I have a sneaking suspicion the response received was not the one desired, and there shall be few replies here. Hopefully I'm wrong.

I don't think you're wrong, I just think you're talking about something totally different, because you can engage in the solipsistic production of CV additions AND make contributions to the greater understanding of your field. Just don't neglect the former because you're intent on the latter.

I took that point, thank you, and if you can do it, then of course a good paper is more worthwhile. That doesn't mean a mediocre paper isn't. "Just to boost your CV" seems to me a perfectly valid reason to do something, be it a conference or anything else.

Because it boosts your CV? I'm seriously confused as to why you wouldn't see this as a valid reason. As one of my professors said at the start of a seminar course last semester: "We all know why you're in grad school, right? To get tenure!"

I don't necessarily see why you can't present at a conference for the purpose of boosting your CV. That's never prevented someone from writing a good or original paper which they otherwise wouldn't have. If I'm researching a subject, and I see a call for papers that I want to answer, I will see if I can't spin off a small part of my current project into something presentable. I'd be lying if I said I was doing this for any reason other than my CV, either directly through another item on it, or indirectly, by increasing familiarity with my name and my work. Of course, if you present a boring and derivative paper, it doesn't help you with the latter. Nor are boring and derivative papers the exclusive domain of MA students; you'll get plenty from full professors, in time. Conferences, both Grad and not, are almost always worth the time to attend and present, particularly if they're close to home. I would submit- the worst thing they can say is no, and it's great practice and a great experience. Asking MA students for the full paper in lieu of an abstract is not a practice I've previously seen.

I would also add that Sigaba and CageFree are totally correct and very much worth listening to. In closing, I would emphasize, once again, that there is no such thing as a safety school. Late edit: out of curiosity, which professor(s) at Harvard were you hoping to work with?

The first thought I had was that the areas of interest you've chosen - Imperial Rom and Late Antiquity - are vastly divergent. This isn't a huge problem if you're willing to do either, but don't apply to schools with the intent to do both. That seems to me to be a surefire way to get thrown on the "Doesn't know what they want to do" pile. Also: what languages do you know, and how well? I would also say that I'm in a similar position; I got my BA (ALB, actually) this May at the age of 27. I, too, dropped out of college back when I was 20. I applied to 8 doctoral programs and was told across the board that they liked my apps, but that I needed to get a MA and come back to show them I wasn't a risk. Fortunately, I had applied to those as well. I would do the same. Finally, as others have said, there are no safe schools.

I have a Lenovo X1 Ultrabook I bought with a tax refund this past year. I can't say I'm disappointed by it. I also have a massive tower PC with two monitors at home, which I find helpful. A lot of the stuff I do is digital; http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do is one of my RA jobs.

I'm curious about this because I've been to Kzoo for the conference and heard some good things, but I also got the impression that the output quality of the program varies greatly. I knew a person with a degree from there who was looking at applying to history PhD programs, and had essentially no Latin, and no German or French. That raised a lot of flags for me.

Wait, we weren't supposed to start already?

I'm in a very humanities part of history- social/intellectual/religious history of the high Middle Ages. Nonetheless, a lot of what I do is informed by the social sciences, and I feel there is a distinct need for quantitative methods in what have been purely qualitative fields. I also think that attempts to keep history in the humanities also is detrimental to the field as a whole, because social science methods should inform the entire discipline, including those of us who are mainly bookworms. I worry a lot about silos.

This has been bugging me for a while. The history subforum here sits in the Humanities section, yet every program I applied to (8) in this past cycle had the history department as part of the Social Sciences division. On the other hand, I've encountered problems with anthropologists and the like when I've tried to insist on that point. What are we? Are we undergoing a change or has it already happened? Did it never happen?

I took my GRE at the Comm Ave place. No problems.

I've put this elsewhere, but I'm a medievalist, so I just did the starbucks card with this note: