cloudofunknowing

Aspire, what're your areas of interest/specialization? I ask because, at least for medievalists, the University of Toronto has an excellent, excellent reputation in the US among medievalists, anyway. I'm familiar with several scholars, including one professor at the school I'll be attending, who completed their PhD's at Toronto. That may not hold as true for other areas, granted. I was also under the impression (mistaken? I don't know) that McGill had a good reputation too in the US, but that view is likely biased by the fact that Anne Carson, one of my favorite contemporary poets and also a fabulous classicist, completed her PhD there.

Surely surely. I'll be there & would be happy to relay thoughts/impressions here or via PM. & yea, compared to last year, this thread is Rip Van Winkle. Perhaps it'll heat up this week or after the recruitment festivities. It might also be that few of those offered admission really post here. Those of us going to UT this week have done a bit of "hi, we're excited!" e-mails back & forth to each other. I'm just grateful that the weather, all things considered with respect to this time of year (or any) in Texas, looks like it's going to be awesome.

This. Kyrie eleison, yes. The yoga-all-day-every-day is going to have to ensue in force for that to become a reality. Thankfully, there are yoga studios & places for a mat to be spread all over Austin.

This reminds me of a fracas at Brooklyn College not too long ago because of Butler lecturing/having a conversation there about relations between Israel and Palestine (her remarks given at that event can be found here http://www.thenation.com/article/172752/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds). Despite the fact that Kafka was the subject to be discussed, I guess she perhaps didn't want a repeat of all of that, and perhaps thought it likely due to the venue. I'm 99% sure that I will be heading up to Austin to do medieval things at UT this Fall - and I'm familiar with the work of Geraldine Heng and Elizabeth Scala, less so with the other medievalist faculty, and excited to meet them all - can you say more about this? This Fall during the madness of all the application stuff, I realized that the 2012 Exemplaria symposium had video archives (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/english/exemplaria/Live-Stream.php) of the different papers and q&a's for the different panels they held. Just stellar stuff - Carolyn Dinshaw, Karma Lochrie, Jeffrey Cohen, Sara Poor, Patricia Claire Ingham, Geraldine Heng, Louise Aranye Fradenburg - Evans gave an essay as part of the panel on gender and chaired the final panel. Very, very cool. I hope another of those conferences happens soon!

I'm wondering the same thing about UT-Austin acceptances/recruitment weekend -- & second the well-wishes. If Dante were around, I think he'd have put waiting to hear from programs in the very final circle of hell.

I understand what you mean about how the number of languages needed can be daunting. I didn't let it deter me, though -- having only the barest smattering of Latin, something I'm going to rectify the first opportunity I get this coming Fall -- and was upfront about what languages I intended to study/pursue (French in addition to Latin) beyond Spanish (were I to have need of it). Since I am so interested in Mechthild of Magdeburg's writings and those of Meister Eckhart, I wonder if German might not get thrown into the mix, too, haha....a language I've never studied at all.

The Babel Working Group also has a Facebook page that throws interesting things out into the ether on a regular basis. The medievalist I studied with as a part of my MFA is a part of Babel; I'll check with her to see how one might join the listserv. The people who run the In the Middle medievalist blog are also affiliated with Babel & punctum books, which published a book by Aranye Fradenburg last year -- Staying Alive -- that I cannot wait to read.

If queer theory and/or Early Modern and/or spectrality are things of interest to you, Carla Freccero is also at Santa Cruz. Her Queer / Early / Modern is fabulous. With respect to feminist theory and studies, Karen Barad is also there -- a theoretical physicist -- who does some fascinating things with philosophy of science, is also there.

This is just my experience, but for what it's worth -- 1. No: Though I am not bilingual to the point where I'd say such on a resume or cv, I do have a great of facility with Spanish (reading/writing/speaking) by virtue of being a native of South Texas. But I am most definitely not anything close to a "fluent" speaker of the language. I don't necessarily know that that skill will have a great deal of bearing on the graduate work I do (Latin and French and, potentially, Spanish). So, the primary language(s) that'd have direct bearing on my research (Latin) are things I'd be solidifying and cultivating while pursuing my PhD. 2. No: I do not have any academic publications; I also haven't presented at any academic conferences. Now, in holding an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), I have quite a few publication credits for poems in both print and online journals, but I don't know that a committee would hold those in the same regard as research-driven scholarship. My understanding here is that while having academic publications can certainly be positive additions to an application, it is the promise/potential for producing scholarship that's looked for. 3. I can't speak to/for all programs, but I don't believe too many English PhD programs interview applicants. UT-Austin does not, and I was both surprised and thrilled to be accepted by them as a Medieval/Early Modern applicant. In this insanely competitive field, it seems to me that while things like GRE scores and, to a lesser extent perhaps, GPA's might be used to thresh an applicant pool, it's a combination of an applicant's statement of purpose and writing sample - plus, to varying degrees, letters of recommendation - that really cause people to stand out. Or that's how I've been able to figure it, anyway, and that's what my mentors have told me. That and a lot of serendipity! (A lot of the latter.)

Re: where the visionary and the queer intersect, the signposts I've followed & learned from in my own work have largely come by way of Dinshaw (Getting Medieval but also more generally), Lochrie (especially her essay "Queer Acts, Mystical Tendencies" in the edited volume Constructing Medieval Sexuality) in terms of method and directions and, more generally in terms of cultural studies and gender studies, the writings of Gail McMurray Gibson. And Butler! Are you using the final parts of Gender Trouble in relation to the lais? I actually will be in Austin and at UT during that conference but won't be attending it -- unless they incorporate parts of it as a part of their recruitment activities. But that paper sounds fascinating!

Hello, all - I was wondering if anyone else who's posted acceptances for UT is planning on attending the recruitment event at the end of March?

Hey there, Guinevere - that class sounds fantastic - I'd take it, anyway! Sadly, no, not going to Kalamazoo (this year). And Indiana - I take it you've studied (or will) with Karma Lochrie? She and Dinshaw are (my teachers aside) who/what made me want to embark on this trek. Her book Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't - just fantastic.

Wow, it's so interesting to see how varied all of your interests are across the spectrum of the "Middle Ages!" I don't know about you, but in the literature courses I took as a part of my MFA - a Non-Chaucerian course and one on Medieval Women Writers - and, especially, the ones I took as an undergraduate, I was often one of the only (if not the only) ones electrified by the subject matter. (How anyone doesn't find Chaucer hilarious and heartbreaking is beyond me. Not to mention the naughtiness.) It's nice to see others tracking down parallel paths in the wilderness, however geographically far-flung each of us is. Where the visionary meets up with gender and/or sexuality in queer ways is, I guess, my bread and butter. Whether the text(s) in question are Middle English or sixteenth-century. And where the cultural studies part comes in, usually, has to do with how the slipperiness, or instability, or incoherence of categories like man/woman, male/female, ab/normal in medieval contexts has a great deal to say about similar fractures in contemporary societies. How the instability or incoherence of a term like "sodomy," for example - to lift out of the book by Jordan I've been reading - began/had its inception in a state of confusion that has only gotten more layered as time has gone on. (Interestingly, he claims that, for the medieval theologians who invented the term, sodomy finally came to mean whatever said theologian wanted it to mean. A curious parallel, to me, is how sodomy was often one of the vices attributed to someone suspected of Lollardy, despite the fact that pinning down what Lollardy was, let alone a Lollard, was almost hopelessly vexing.) Along those lines, questions regarding space and, especially, temporalities have most recently begun to vie for my attention.

Hi there - my interests cut a swath from the late medieval through the early modern poetry (from Chaucer & the Pearl Poet through Herbert & Donne) and the rise of vernacular theology and lay spirituality in mystical/visionary texts and in medieval drama. Pilgrimage, the cult of saints, and hagiography (and especially Margery Kempe's auto-hagiography) also gets thrown onto my radar from time to time because of my teachers. Community formation, especially in the late Middle Ages, is also interesting to me with respect to the beginnings of the Reformation in England re: Wycliffe in particular and the Lollards in general; this extends to being curious about other lay spiritual communities like the Beguines on the Continent and the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete. Where theology and mysticism walk hand-in-hand, I'm also very interested in the apophatic trend (whence my username), the writings of Meister Eckhart, and the impact of Pseudo-Dionysus on the writings of medieval theologians. The main lens, or rubric, I use to look at these different things through tends to be along a gender/sexuality axis and, especially, queer studies. The other half of my interests/pursuits is on the creative writing side - I hold an MFA - so I applied to an array of programs in both areas. So far, I've been accepted by UT-Austin to do literature (medieval/early modern), and I'm 95% certain that is where I'll be come Fall as I was rejected by Duke and the likelihood of getting into Harvard is, well, highly unlikely. As far as reading goes, since it's been a while since I've had any Chaucer in my life, John Gardner's The Life and Times of Chaucer has been my bedside reading lately. Scholarship-wise, I've been perusing Mark Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology and revisiting Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (she is, I guess you could say, my idol in terms of the type of scholarship to which I aspire). Good luck to you both!

Hi, KGB - I was/am in your exact situation. I have a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry also, graduated last year). Because my interests converge & diverge - Medieval/Early Modern things & Cultural Studies on the "scholarly" side, & then an abiding interest in poetics & poetries from the ancients to contemporaries on the "creative" side - I was similarly tugged in both directions when trying to decide what I wanted to do and/or where I wanted to apply. I enjoy scholarship & research for their own sakes & do often find the two pursuits (scholarship / poetry) to be mutually constitutive. In the end, I decided to apply to both straight-up English programs to study literature & also Literature/Creative Writing programs, & decided that I'd worry about choosing which path to take based upon where I got in / what my options were. It's still early in the application game (I've yet to hear from several of the Lit/Creative programs, & one literature program), so I'm not yet sure what my final decision will be. But I learned that I was accepted into UT-Austin's program today so, to answer your question, yes, it's certainly possible. Because I knew that, were I to pursue a PhD in literary studies, the fields I'd specialize in would likely be Medieval/Early Modern, I very purposefully took as many literature classes as possible during my MFA to demonstrate an ability to engage in those fields as a scholar. In terms of my other credentials, I did quite a bit of undergrad coursework in those areas, too - & attended a top-ranked liberal arts college, was lucky to study with a well-regarded medievalist on faculty there - had GRE scores within the range of normally accepted students (according to UT's website, that is), as polished a writing sample as possible (that'd been raked over the coals by two medievalists I've studied with), & what I believe were strong recommendation letters. I also worked hard to make my statement of purpose be germane to the scholarly work I hope to undertake & did not focus on what I'd achieved as a poet while an MFA student & afterward (in terms of publications, etc, all of which were listed on my CV). All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in no way do I think that having an MFA would be detrimental to pursuing a PhD in literature. If anything, I would think (& have hoped as I've been applying) it would demonstrate a breadth of engagement & interests, not to mention a capacity to do literary studies at the graduate level, since virtually every MFA program I know of requires people to take graduate-level literature courses as a part of the MFA degree.

Hi, everyone - I'm one of the ones who posted an acceptance to UT-Austin earlier today. I received an e-mail from the Director of Graduate Studies around 5pm &, within the past hour or so, received an automated e-mail from the ApplyYourself letting me know that a decision had been made on my application. So while I can't speak to when other notifications are going to be sent (waitlist, etc) - because I haven't been in direct communication with anyone there - I would think that they'll be forthcoming very, very soon. Here's hoping for good news for each of you!