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unræd

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Everything posted by unræd

  1. Hah! De gustibus, etc etc etc.
  2. In fairness to both you and your academic exes, everyone is exactly that boring when they talk about their research.
  3. Congrats, Hypervodka! I can't speak for the other people who've received offers from other schools, but the sense I've gotten thus far is that the earliness of my Urbana admission was tied up with the deadline for the specific (sort of crazy good?) fellowship they're applying for on my behalf. I don't think it means that they've made all the other decisions about the cohort, or that people who haven't heard yet won't be admitted! Edited since I now see that lyonessrampant mentioned this upthread!
  4. I am out of up votes, hreaðemus, but I owe you one!
  5. I didn't mention my sexuality in my applications (although I'd imagine it's obvious from some of my interests), but not because I was afraid of biasing programs against me so much as it would have read as kind of boring in relation to my interests. "Bookish boy who likes boys likes books on boys--(tasteful) film at eleven!" But worry about biasing people against me? No way. Or rather: I'd hope so. I mean, if a program's the type of program where my being gay is gonna be an issue, then yes, please, I'd hope it'd bias them against me and that they'd throw my application out--I wouldn't want to go there.
  6. Yes! Such a good book!
  7. Is anyone else sort of shocked at how very, very queer this year's GC cohort is?
  8. While of course I'd like to think I'm super-duper special, it's probably not the case. I am, however, that Tuesday Urbana English admit! Ah! So excited! I'd been avoiding the fora since December to try to maintain a bit of calmness and detachment--which, surprisingly, works; I've gone whole days without thinking about my applications or graduate school, which I wouldn't have thought possible. But I sure as hell didn't think I'd hear from a program this soon! Edited to clear up timeframe.
  9. Sure, sure--we're both strong candidates, I think, and it's likely we'll both be perfectly happy when all's said and done. But a comment like that from a prof. at Berkeley does presumably carry some weight, and can't help but lead to the kind of unhealthy thinking that is pretty much exactly the reason I'll be avoiding GC for the duration! The application process is this weird beast compounded of equal measures of hope and fear, and is soul-abrading enough without having to bring elements of interpersonal comparison--or even feigned jousting!--into it. Now that the application season is winding down, I'm gonna check out and try to think about anything other than my applications until things start getting real in February. See y'all on the other side!
  10. As someone applying to a lot of your schools and in the same tiny field: if you do get into all of your programs, do spare a thought for people who might be on the wait list!
  11. At the moment all my reading is for my swiftly approaching paper deadlines. Email from a (wonderful, dear, helpful, etc) prof last night, for a paper due Monday, though: "I left you photocopies of some more chapters I think you should read in my campus mailbox. Enjoy!" Honestly, right now the only pleasurable textual consumption I'm doing is binge watching episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race over and over until my mind has reached a nice pudding consistency. But over break, I'll be tackling the Prose Edda, an Old Norse reader, a Modern Icelandic grammar, a collection of Lydia Davis's short stories, some Lord Dunsany, and whatever books I've managed to wrench out of my family as Christmas presents.
  12. Sounds excellent--my library's copy is winging its way toward me. Thank you for the bibliography!
  13. I have nothing well-formed or specific to offer to the discussion, which means I should probably just shut the hell up, but Proflorax's post about "what sort of scholar do you want to be" really sort of hits home with stuff I've been thinking about the past few weeks as I try to negotiate this rift between methodology and politics. Like proflorax, I'm someone who can decide to care or not (a horrific thing to contemplate in itself), and like mollifiedmolloy, I study (and want to study more, adcomms, hint hint) literatures at a great linguistic, cultural, and historical remove from the present. And I say what follows as someone who in what (yes, little--and undergraduate!) scholarship I've done tends to focus on very traditional approaches: philology, word study, formal cruces. The major research project I've been focusing on this semester, examining and preparing a critical edition of this late medieval manuscript, is about as far removed from any sort of contemporary political engagement as you can possibly imagine--I literally am writing whole pages on topics like whether there's a space between that u and that i and what the implications of that would be. And I'm fine with that; it's fun work, I've discovered some new things, and I firmly believe that the production of knowledge of any kind is an inherent good. That's the kind of work I want to do; that's the kind of work I'm applying to graduate school to do. But still. There is a sense of--not sterility, exactly, and not aridness. But I think dazedandbemused hits it exactly on the nose: there's something about the new (read: old) formalist turn that--and again, I say this as someone who loves to make those kind of arguments!--I find dangerously disconnected from (or that can perhaps allow a dangerous disconnection to?) contemporary, urgent, political, and humane interests. Two recent examples that stuck in my craw: a (white) graduate student who starts saying that a (black) professor's language, in emails to the department listserves about recent events and the department's response, was "too violent," and my complicated, conflicted reaction to both his complaint and to her emails; and then a heated (pleasantly so, though, let me be quick to say!) discussion about the issue of political engagement and scholarship with a good, good friend of mine who's a PhD student a couple weeks ago. We normally take very similar approaches, but it quickly became clear that she has an idea of politically disinterested scholarship--or rather, an idea that scholarship should strive to be politically disinterested, or that it can be--of which I'm pretty darn skeptical. I guess I'm saying that, unlike Wyatt's Torch, I do maybe blame professors who choose to teach the discipline in a vacuum? Okay, so in something very technical like, say, a paleography class, there's not going to be scope for broader political engagement. You're learning very specific skills there, not discussing wider issues of any kind--literary, social, or political. The fact that straight s with a pronounced thickening and pointy end is a sign of a certain script, date, and location does it, in fact, have any sort of relationship to the fact that we live in a society that is, has been, and will be really pretty fucked up. But you'd be surprised how often it does turn up, even in the most seemingly benign philological topics. Just today I was asking a friend which pronunciation of Old Norse I should learn, which you'd think would be the most anodyne and politically not-fraught question you could imagine, but the answer ended up having a lot to do with the contemporary reception of a large body of scholarship that's been tainted by it having been given the Nazis' imprimatur. More broadly, I think any Old English class that doesn't address the frank racism out of which the field initially grew (or at least with which it was watered) ignores some basic things about what it is Anglo-Saxonists do, and have done, that continue to structure the field. That said, I mean, crap: it's easy for me to say, here, on the internets, as an undergraduate, how people in academia should act. I'm not the one up in front of a classroom. I'd have zero idea how to even begin to address it pedagogically, and I know myself and my timidity well enough to know that I probably wouldn't, and that bothers me.
  14. This is late, but: if you're discussing specific semantic aspects of a word that's not in common use, and especially discussing what its possible meanings were at a specific point in time, you should definitely cite a lexicographic source. The OED is standard, and will also give you usages of it contemporary to Holinshed's that you can compare it to!
  15. Welcome! I'm an English PhD applicant, too--I'd encourage you to check out the English forum; there's a lot of excellent advice/support on offer there. In my own SOPs, I've discussed just the sort of things you've mentioned, which varies by program: professors who study some of the same issues that I do or conduct research using similar approaches, with examples (when there is an actual fit); resources for research (libraries, manuscript collections, interdisciplinary centers); opportunities for teaching and professionalization, etc etc etc. I haven't discussed location in any of them as a general thing.
  16. In the beginning was the Word.1
  17. That last bit, right there. I mean, really, I think this is one of those things that matters so much less than any of us imagine, one of those little, minor ("Does the font I've chosen for my CV have the appropriate kerning?") things we grab onto because there are, in some ways, so few handholds for us in this process, so few things that actually are under our control.
  18. I know you're joking, but why would that make you at all self-conscious about your WS? Even if you were applying to do medieval work, which you aren't, there's no reason to assume that stuff has to be in Chicago simply because that's what the majority of the field uses--we're submitting writing samples, not articles to Speculum. (And besides, there certainly are medieval journals that do use MLA!) Plus--I know your sample. It's just lovely!
  19. If you navigate a few pages back in this thread, you'll see that this very issue of what to note and how, especially in relation to second language sources, came up a bit earlier, too--you're not alone! My sample is also about wordplay in a language that isn't modern English, so there was definitely a lot of foreign language material. Some of that (especially secondary stuff) got put it in footnotes (I generally use Chicago anyway), but some is still in body of the paper to make it plain what I'm talking about. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to relegate it to endnotes--while I'm utterly convinced no one's going to be pouring through my detailed footnotes as they read one of however many writing samples they have to plow through, in case there is something they want to check I'd rather it was right there on the same page for them instead of making them have to flip twenty pages forward. In terms of whether or not to have foot- or endnotes, in some ways the conventions really are subfield-dependent--for medievalists, at least, no one really uses MLA. Chicago's the norm.
  20. An early admit would be delightful--my stress level will go down so much just as soon as I know I'll be going somewhere, and all the schools to which I've applied are places I'd be happy to be. I keep joking that as soon as I get one, I can just call up the others and tell them to take my name off their lists!
  21. Indeed! I am so look looking forward to that moment when all my apps are complete, the semester is over, and I head home for the holidays. I'm going to try not to think about graduate school one single bit at that point, but focus on having fun over break, enjoying my new classes when they start up in January, and preparing for my upcoming conference presentation. A question for those who've done this before, though: how, aside from keeping a scrupulously cleaned inbox, did you deal with the stress of waiting? I'm going to try to adopt an attitude of disinterested equanimity, but let's not kid ourselves on how successful I'll be--any specific recommendations or whatnot? I know several people have said to avoid GC during that time, and I must admit part of me thinks it'd be healthy not to log between, say, when my apps are completed and when I get my first rejection and need an electronic shoulder to cry on or my first acceptance and need someone to help pop the digital champagne. Other thoughts/hints/strategies that worked for y'all, or things those of you who are just now undergoing this process intend to try to do to keep yourself hale and whole?
  22. Two of my letter writers are doing a lot of tailoring of each letter to each specific school. That's great--wonderful, thank you, I'm filled up with gratitude from the bottom of my heart! Here's the thing, though. One of them does it in batches, uploading about two at a time a few days before the next set of deadlines. Cool. But the other one has submitted each of the letters that have been due thus far in the early evening of their deadlines, which is turning those days into inordinately stressful, high-stakes games of temporal chicken. On each and every one, as the clock ticks down through the day my own tics get worse: "Is this the day he'll forget? Should I send him another reminder? I'm worrying for nothing, right? Surely he'll remember!" Cue the nervous laughter as I reach for a tumbler.
  23. I'm doing well-ish! My plan was to submit all my apps over the weekend in a mad bacchanal of mouse clicks and bourbon, but that didn't happen. I did submit my first two applications, though, and will pull the trigger on another four this week! The last four, all due in the new year, will have to wait until when classes are done (and when I have more money for app fees--id est with which to fund the "Prospective Students" weekends they'll throw for those who actually get in) mid December. I'm dying, of course, will all the end of semester work and paper writing I have to do. But, people asked for good news: I got accepted to a real, live, grown-up, national manuscript studies conference! Woot!
  24. I'd think so… but maybe I'm wrong? Anybody else?
  25. For what it's worth, I mention it, but don't describe it at length since, as you say, they'll have it in front of them. I have a sentence that talks about the way in which my writing sample is a good example of the approach I'd like to take in graduate studies, but I certainly don't rehash its content/argument.
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