natsteel

I personally have four friends/colleagues in my field who did UK PhDs (3 at Oxbridge, one at Stirling in Scotland), one of the four being American. 2 of them got TT jobs in the US at state schools after having already done a postdoc or VAP in the US. The third had lesser luck initially on the job market trying to secure a job in the US but eventually did secure a TT job in England after maybe 2-3 years. The fourth, the non-Oxbridge grad, ended up getting a prestigious postdoc in NYC and when that ended, he secured a job as an Asst. Editor at one of the most prestigious documentary editing projects in the US. All that is to say, doing your PhD in the UK does not automatically close the door on the US job market. It can make it a bit more difficult, though not by default.

I second Blight's Race and Reunion. If you wanted to check out some theoretical works on history and memory, here are a few I used in preparing to begin a dissertation on historical memory: Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133. Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory.” In Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, edited by Thomas Butler, 97–114. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. De Gruyter, 2008. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A Coser. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1992. Hutton, Patrick H. “Mnemonic Schemes in the New History of Memory.” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997): 378–391. Hutton, Patrick H. “Recent Scholarship on Memory and History.” The History Teacher 33, no. 4 (2000): 533–548. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Till, Karen E. “Memory Studies.” History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 325–341.

I use Papers by Mekentosj for exactly what you're describing, something about which I've posted here a number of times.

I'm a bit surprised as well. When I applied 4 years ago, I absolutely contacted POIs with an email very similar in length and content to the one(s) in the post above. You are contacting them ostensibly to find out if they're taking students. I didn't apply to 3 schools (so saved maybe $300) when my POI advised me that they'd be retiring in the near future. I sent emails to 12 POIs and 11 responded and all of them were kind. The POI at my first choice responded to my email by asking to meet with me and I have no doubt that that meeting played a big role in her decision to choose me as the one admit she had for that year. For the OP's specific situation I agree with the poster above who says you might go back to your advisor and mention that the application asks with whom you have been in contact.

One example of a workflow involving primary sources and dissertation-size projects: http://earlyamericanists.com/2013/06/18/digital-workflow-for-historians/

I gave my own mid-semester evaluation sheets with the usual rate on a scale of 1 to 5 questions and then "What did you like?" and "What didn't you like?" questions. I got some really positive feedback which helped boost my confidence since it was my first semester and I got some very useful critiques. Before I gave it to them, I gave them a little speech about how evaluations help teachers improve and so they should not brush them off at the end of the semester but take a few minutes and, whether it's positive or negative, at least write something substantive. Anyway, my final evals were excellent and 2 even mentioned that I had done the mid-semester evals and had fixed any problems. On the two class thing, I had the opposite experience. My first section was consistently fantastic and my second was just okay. At the start, I thought it would be like the poster above, i.e., the second one would be better because I would know better after having done the first. But what I found was that the section was as good as the students in it. My first section was full of excellent students and so it was a fantastic section. The students in the second section were often unprepared and/or less engaged and the section was less useful to them because of it. We're not miracle workers and to a fair extent we can only work with what the students give us.

I never thought it was strange. I just accepted it for what it was, a conventionality, at least among all academics with whom I've corresponded. I've adopted a policy of "Best" in informal emails among my cohort and familiar colleagues and "Best regards" in my formal emails to unfamiliar academics or institutions.

ChibaCity is spot on. The advantages of being at a top tier program have a lot to do with resources (personal, professional, material, etc...). And while what NewEnglandNat is saying might be unpopular, it can only be ignored at one's own peril. To say that it's okay to go to a 2nd tier school because you want to "focus on teaching" at a public university is hardcore rationalization. I started at a community college as a first-generation college student and graduated from a small public university and have been lucky enough to end up at a PhD program near the top of the list. As someone above said, coming from a top 10 program no longer guarantees you a job. Ivy League graduates are applying for those teaching jobs at public universities. And as those universities rely more and more on adjuncts and become more and more desperate for funding, they care less about good teaching. I know most people I am friends with in my program are worried about the job market and most of them have or expect to have plan B's beyond public university jobs. Also at the risk of angering some people, Nat is right about most of the things he wrote and some board members would do well to heed what he's saying. That's not to say if you are in a program ranked #65 you should quit or not go if you're accepted into a program of that ranking. That is a personal decision. But it is to say that you should not go into something like that without being fully aware of your employment prospects and the reality of the situation in academia as it stands.

Just for the record, I work on colonial America and got into Yale with the equivalent of a 161V and 146Q and 4.0AW. Exceptional writing sample, SOP, and LORs will outweigh mediocre GRE scores. I can also suggest programs if you want to PM me with more specifics.

Eigen, I don't know if you're on Mac or PC but either way, just download the trial version and give it a shot. Obviously one's choice of a citation manager or applications in general is very subjective, but you really should try it out to see what it can do rather than me just listing features. Since it started out at a PDF manager, it far exceeds EndNote in that capacity, including in terms of internal search/import of databases, Google Scholar, and Amazon. Also, EndNote, for me, has serious GUI issues having not fundamentally changed much since pre-X PC versions. I haven't used the iPad app yet but I have used it for iPod and that one worked fine. If you're even slightly considering it, definitely give the trial a chance.

For years, I used EndNote, but 3 years ago I switched to Papers both to organize, read, and annotate my PDFs (currently over 3,000) and as a citation manager. However, I still have EndNote and I still create new, individual EndNote libraries for specific projects. But Papers really is a one-stop shop when it comes to both PDFs and citation management. It has Mac, PC, iPad, and iPhone apps that allow you to sync your library between devices. If you're in the market for a PDF organizer or citation manager, I would recommend at least taking a look at it.

I didn't find that to be the case. I sent out 12 or 13 feeler emails to POIs inquiring about whether they were taking students and all but one responded and more than half led to further correspondence. I, too, was worried about wasting money on applications that had no chance. By sending out those emails, I found out that 3 of the POIs I was considering were planning to retire within the next 1-3 years and so weren't taking new students. I started sending out emails the first week of September and I've always thought of contacting POIs for this purpose as being the final step in the process of narrowing down your list of schools. Of course, YMMV.

Thanks, vt and viggo for the kind words about the guide I put together last year. Ever since writing it, I've been asked to give seminars on the topic at CUNY, at which I give out the guide at the end. It's basically everything I learned about the process (a lot of it from my fellow members of GradCafe). It took a little bit of time to put together, but I'm glad someone is finding it and finding it useful. As for the application fees, don't forget that many school (though not CUNY and not, IIRC, Stanford) offer fee waivers. However, most don't publicize this fact for obvious reasons. It often takes real digging through their website to find it. To get them, you are usually required to submit either a letter from your financial aid office (verifying your Pell Grant eligibility) or your previous year's tax return. IIRC, I got waivers at about 5 of the 11 schools to which I applied, including the one to which I eventually ended up attending (if I was a psychic, I could've saved around $700 in application fees).

You should do all the things in it that you would in a standard review. Put the book in its historiographic context, break down the argument, methodology, source base, and cover its strengths and weaknesses. Don't make it personal. The committee should understand why that book has shaped your understanding of the kind of work you want to do after they've read your personal statement, so you don't need to make that explicit in your review.

As to your first question about how not having attended a "top school" will affect your chances, I worried about the same thing. I started at a community college and finished my BA at a VERY large urban public university system. My advisors told me it definitely wouldn't hurt me when applying. I was skeptical, but they turned out to be right. Of our history department's graduating class that year, 3 accepted offers from top Ivies (including myself), another got into UMichigan, and another went to UKansas. Over a three-year period, that department had students accept offers from: 5 Ivies (3 at Yale alone in 18th c., 20th-eastern Europe, HistofScience, 1 at Harvard in Af-Am Studies, 1 at Princeton for Latin America) 1 each at Northwestern (Brazil), Michigan (Latin America), Duke (Haiti), and Kansas (19th c.). And that's all in the last 3 years from a college that's part of a huge university system, neither of which are even ranked regionally. Moral of the story: Your work and what others think of it and your potential is what gets you in to graduate programs, not the name of your undergrad institution. EDIT: I just saw that my school was ranked #369 in the country in Forbes' 2012 list. So I guess "unranked" is now inaccurate.