Ramus

Fair enough. In the future, just make sure not to check off the box that says you'd consider attending without funding. Occasionally, programs will get apps from the super rich (see James Franco) or from folks with national scholarships. That box is for them to check.

I'm confused. Why would you go out of your way to change your answer on the question if you don't have outside funding? If you suggest you can go there without funding, you're absolutely signaling to them that you have the means to attend the program without them ponying up the funds for you. It's really the only thing you could say in order to get an unfunded offer. If you don't have the money to fund your PhD, I'm not sure why you'd care if they extend you an unfunded offer or not, unless your goal is conciliatory affirmation. I'm not trying to be a jerk in saying that. I just really don't understand.

Also: I would strongly suggest you not consider a MA program that makes you teach a 3/3 load at any point. That amount of teaching should signal to you that the department is less interested in you as a developing scholar than as a source of labor.

Strode admits 2-3 MAs per year and 1-2 PhDs. As a former Strode MA, I'd recommend the program if you're interesting in early modern lit, @Cotton Joe. However, if, as you say in your initial post, your primary interest is not early modern lit, I would not recommend Alabama. The base stipend is paltry, the teaching load is high, and the non-early modern course offerings are not the greatest. My fiancée, an African-Americanist who also did her MA at 'Bama, often felt dissatisfied with the program, thinking it treated its non-early modern grad students as little more than cheap labor. From what I could tell, she wasn't alone in feeling the way she did; there was a general discontentment among the non-Strode literature students.

If you search this forum's back topics, you'll come across several lists of funded MA programs (your question gets asked several times a year). Some of the programs listed may have since adjusted their funding, though, so be sure to verify their current funding on their department pages.

In the last couple of years, the English department here at OSU has made a big push advertising itself as "five branches [or whatever the number is], one department." From that, you'd think there'd be pretty strong ties between the Columbus campus and our branches. But my own sense is that the connections between folks in Columbus and those in Marion, Lima, etc. vary quite a bit. In my own period (early modern), for example, we have four or five people working across the various branch campuses. One of them regularly attends our workshops, dissertation seminars, and lectures here in Columbus; I wouldn't have an problem asking her to serve on my committee or read over my work. But as far as the other early modernists go, I haven't so much as seen an email from them. So, to answer your last question, it depends. As always, your best bet is to email an appropriate period specialist in the department and ask.

There's no question: you should put far more emphasis on the methodology . You might eventually write a monograph on the sonnets (à la Joel Fineman's Shakespeare's Perjured Eye), but doctoral dissertations never focus on a single primary text and very rarely deal with only one author. Partly that's a job market thing: there aren't jobs for experts on the Sonnets, but there are (a couple of) jobs for experts of Renaissance poetry, so advisors want you to demonstrate competence in the broader job market categories. It's also partly a consequence of the constraints of academic publishing: monographs on a single author are a pretty hard sell normally, and no one really publishes monographs on single works anymore. Even if you got a job after writing a dissertation on the Sonnets, you'd be in a tough spot when trying to shop around your book project. I realize you're concerned about selling a methodology when you don't have a lot of experience applying it to other works, but I actually wouldn't be all that worried about it at this point; programs don't expect you to have your dissertation anywhere near figured out. However, I think it'd be a good idea to suggest plausible expansions for the philological project you're discussing in the SOP. Since your WS is on the Sonnets, it'd make sense if you proposed writing on Astrophil and Stella, The Temple, or the Amoretti next. If you're looking for a model on how you might sell a philological project, I can't recommend highly enough the introduction to Roland Greene's Five Words (Chicago, 2013). It makes the case for a large-scale study of individual words without turning to digital tools. You'd think it'd be really conservative project, but I think Greene makes a strong case for the project's innovation and necessity. Definitely worth checking out if you're doing anything philologically oriented.

Our PhD track in comic studies here at Ohio State might be a decent option for you. In addition to housing the world's largest collection of comics and comic-related materials, Ohio State has a wide-reaching popular culture collective, which includes professors and students from five or six different departments but is primarily based in the English department. You can learn more by visiting https://popularculturestudies.osu.edu/.

They send out scores within five business days of receiving your request.

I seem to remember taking the exam in October, and I had no problem with scores arriving on time for application deadlines in December.

I think that's fairly standard. I had three versions of mine: one clocking in at about 18 pages, one at 20, and the final one at 27. Unless you're only applying to three or four schools with similar application requirements, it would be really difficult to get away with having one writing sample.

I'm of two minds on this one. On the one hand, it might not hurt if you mention it in applications for non-top-fifteen schools where you'll teach more and varied classes. In your case, @Wyatt's Terps, your apps to UNC, OSU, UMD, and Alabama might benefit from acknowledging your teaching experience. If nothing else, it would indicate to adcomms that you're not going to resent the amount of teaching you'll have to do in their programs. (NB: Teaching references in your SOPs for UPenn, UC, and Yale probably wouldn't get you very far, since those places train their students to be a world-class researchers, not teachers.) On the other hand, I'm worried the teaching nod can dip into the lingo of the weepy teaching statement (Cf. The Professor Is In's blog entry on the subject). Programs don't want to hear about the "joy" or "pleasure" we get out of teaching, not only because those are trite descriptions but also because it should go without saying; if you can't at least imagine yourself enjoying teaching, then you're probably not going to apply to graduate programs in English. Also, fairly or not, if your reference to teaching has a whiff of emotionalism, you might get branded as not serious enough for PhD work, or at least unaware of the purpose of doctoral training. Personally, I don't think the risk of talking about teaching is worth the reward, though I can certainly imagine it being done well. If you do end up including a bit about teaching, I'd stick with specifics: what you've taught, what the experience involved, and, looking forward, what about the teaching situation at University X attracts you to their program (opportunities to teach unusual classes, classes in pedagogy, etc.)

By "showing," I mean provide concrete, precise, and specific examples of what the program / location can do for your research. For example, when I was applying to Ohio State, I referred to specific holdings in their rare book library, the school's relationship with the Folger Library in DC, and the early modern reading and dissertation groups on campus. When it came to individual faculty members, I did mention a couple of the Renaissance faculty, but I did so in a way that proved an actual familiarity with their work. Whereas in my first application cycle I said stuff like, "Alan Farmer's work on the history of the book has been fascinating to read," the second time around I wrote something like, "In my MA program, I used Alan Farmer's DEEP database to contextualize Milton's first publication alongside other Caroline masques. Having realized the affordances of large scale comparative work, I can imagine myself expanding this project, working with Dr. Farmer to chart how the material forms of printed plays evolved over the seventeenth-century." The difference between the two is more than just one of length. The first only proves I read the professor's faculty page; the second proves actual familiarity with the dude's work and an understanding of how the guy's presence in the department could benefit me. Note, too, that the second response isn't sycophantic, nor does it need to be, since it has substance (specific examples) undergirding it. I understand what you're saying about not wanting to limit yourself to programs with people whose work you know. However, I really think it's to your advantage to read recent work—a single article, even—written by someone you might be working with. If you read just one essay by one person at each of your schools, you'd already be much better off than you would be if you didn't have any knowledge of the faculty members' specialities (and thus had to result to vacuous ass-kissing). In the event that you can't familiarize yourself with faculty members' work, you might look for alternative reasons for why you're applying to the programs you are. (Doing so may even reinforce your decision to apply.) I've already listed a few of the reasons I chose to apply to my grad program, but I could have listed others: opportunities for genuinely interdisciplinary work; the host of graduate workshops directed by visiting scholars; the various lectures series and the informal get-togethers with big-shot scholars after them; conference support; opportunities for dissertation research funding....you get the picture. That stuff isn't irrelevant to an SOP, in part because many programs explicitly state they're considering you as a potential addition to the larger department and university communities, not as a prospective research machine in your sub-sub-subfield.

I split it fifty-fiftyish. You want to prove you've acquired the skills necessary to succeed in graduate school, drawing on past experiences teaching and/or researching. You also should demonstrates how this past work could be developed. In part, this indicates that you've not exhausted all research avenues you're interested in. It's also about showing you know how to think like a graduate student—that is, you can speculate on how your first stab at a project (seminar paper, capstone project, etc.) can potentially be part of a larger project, like a dissertation. I would keep this to a minimum. You should make it clear why you're applying to a particular program, though namedropping particular scholars always seems a little phony. Anyone can scan a faculty member's department page, so saying you want to work with so-and-so because they do gender and Shakespeare will probably will come off as an empty gesture. The exception to this rule is if you've actually done substantial work in your POI's area of research and have read their work. In that case, you might say something like, so-and-so's work helped me articulate my reading of so-and-so. But even in that scenario, I'd keep the namedropping and waxing on imagined faculty partnerships to a minimum. It's not a silly question, in part because so many people are inclined to take this approach—I certainly did the first time I applied to programs. But I think it's a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First, it comes off as grade-A bullshit. Exceptional programs and faculty already know they're exceptional; mediocre ones know they're mediocre. Some applicant telling them they're great either tells them something they already know, or it tells them something they know to be crap (or at least not entirely true). As a general rule, it's best to stay away from fawning adjectives in the SOP ("impressive," "exceptional," "superb," etc.) Second, I think this approach can very easily backfire by inadvertently positioning you in the role of the program's (or individual professor's) judge. For example, say you were to say something like, "Reading over Dr. So-and-So's work, I've was impressed with his readings of The Tempest." That'd be no good, since it comes across as though you have the authority to appraise an expert's work. Which, as someone straight out of a BA program, you don't. Instead of this approach, I'd suggest you show why you're applying to a program by explaining how a program's resources or faculty can help you pursue the kind of research you want to do.

I've heard Stallybrass is a great mentor for graduate students. I know a couple of people that took his dissertation seminar at the Folger a couple of years ago, and they've only had the best things to say about him. I don't know about Coleman, but I really like Bushnell's work on humanism from the late 90s. Not sure what she's doing now, though. They have a lot of great people working on race/bodies at UMich, Mike being only one of them (he's an alarmingly nice guy to boot). I know, for one, that several of their graduate students focus on the topic, so you wouldn't feel too alone there. I'm sure she's already on your list, but Mary Floyd-Wilson wrote the definitive work on geohumoral race stuff about a decade ago, so UNC might be ideal. You also might look into people working on historical affect. That might be a bit outside your wheelhouse, but the turn toward emotion and affect has attracted a number of people who focused on humoral theory and the body in 00s. The contributors to the recent edited collection Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015) might be of some interest. OSU is a really great place to attend if you're interested in book history. Sarah and Alan are both wonderful (Richard retired this past semester, unfortunately). We also have David Brewer here -- he's an 18th-centuryist, but he does a fair amount with book history and trades off teaching the book history class with Alan. Our library has a pretty decent early book and manuscript collection, and a fair number of us regularly work with those materials. For non-OSU book history people, you might check into these folks: David Kastan (Yale), Zach Lesser (Penn -- I can't believe how deep their early modern bench is), Bill Sherman (York), Heidi Brayman Hackel (UCR), Randall McLeod (Toronto), Peter Blayney (also Toronto), and Gary Taylor (Florida State), to name a few. In general, UVA has a strong reputation in book history and textual criticism, though I can't remember if they have any early modern book historians on payroll. I can't really offer much input on this interest, though I'm pleased to know there's another Coriolanus fan out there in the world! Easily the most underrated of Shakespeare's plays. Its class dynamics are absolutely fascinating, and Aufidius' rumination on Coriolanus at the end of Act 4 is Shakespeare at his best.

For what it's worth, my sense is that the majority of early modernists would identify themselves as historicist, or at least as working on something involving some historical component. Even those people/programs that lean toward the more theoretical, "trendy" topics can be strongly skewed toward historicism (UMich, for example). What are the two or three more specific topics you're interested in? I might be able to throw out a couple of names if I knew that. I'm glad to hear you're shooting for Penn -- I have it on good authority that they have a real death of EM graduate students currently and are trying to correct that this cycle. And if you have any questions about OSU, feel free to PM me!

I don't think the degrees in and of themselves will necessarily give you an edge, though they certainly can if you can demonstrate (i.e. in your WS) that they afford you some unique approach to literary analysis. (And if you don't prove its necessity, your boatload of minors might look like frippery.)

Beat me to it.

Yep. The problem is not that reading from a paper is inherently bad, but that graduate students (and some faculty!) don't understand that writing for print is different than writing for oral delivery. It's a point that's not stressed often enough, let alone taught.

No. Do not retake the test. Regardless of your score, it is not worth the couple hundred bucks (and time spent studying) to retake the test if only two of your schools require it. I know that it feels like you did terribly on the test, but last couple of cycles folks have got into higher ranked schools with scores in the ~20th percentile range. So don't sweat this too much.

You'll notice the qualifications allplaid made in his suggestion. It's conceivable...it's a mild possibility. I think that's about right. Having a publication under your belt probably won't adversely affect your application, but I see the logic behind the claim that it might. Another possibility is that publishing might irk some of those professors who cringe at the thought of premature professionalization. While their numbers are dwindling as more recognize it's no longer viable for graduate students not to publish, some remain. But more likely than either of these two options is that "publication" won't have any effect on your application at all. I put "publication" in scare quotes because, frankly, 99% of PhD applicants claiming to have a publication have something that doesn't count for beans by the standards of the profession. A publication in ELH, SEL, or one of the big, period-specific journals "counts" as a publication; an essay in The Sigma Tau Delta Review does not. When an admissions committee sees an applicant list an essay in the latter on his or her CV, they might think it's "nice," but it really won't count for much more than that. So if you can get published in a major journal, great. If not, don't work yourself to death trying to get published in Southwest Louisiana Tech Community College Journal of Arts just so you can claim you have a publication. Because no one will care.

Yeah, I think what they're doing is already making more of the norm for departments. From their perspective, it makes the most sense not to reject you outright until they've filled all their spots. They don't want to be in the spot of not having their early modern spot filled (they need TAs, after all), but they also don't want to be in the spot of overextending themselves, with too many TA-lines to pay out. There's little downside for them in taking the approach, but meanwhile it does leave you in the lurch.

I got this same treatment from UNC last cycle. I finally got through by contacting Florence Dore (fdore@unc.edu) directly, so you might try her if you haven't done so already.

I don't think so. I was still on the waitlist when they offered to pay for my flight to come visit, and it wasn't suggested that I'd get some inferior reimbursement. I should mention that it was a bit of a hassle trying to get reimbursed by UMD (as it seems to be at every school). Make sure you email their department finance folks after you attend the weekend (english_business@umd.edu). They'll mail you some form you need to sign, which you'll then need to mail back to them before they can process your request. I want to say that, all told, it took six or seven weeks to receive a check.

This is what they said in my admission letter last year: "I am also happy to offer you a funding package for the 2015-2016 academic year, including a graduate assistantship with a 10-month stipend of $22,240, a full tuition scholarship for your tuition up to 24 credits during the academic year and up to 6 credits for the summer, and 75% toward the cost of the Fordham student health insurance program up to a maximum contribution amount of $1500, should you elect to purchase coverage through this program. The value of this award package totals approximately $65,014. You must be enrolled full time in order to benefit from this financial assistance. Your funding is awarded for a 5-year period and will be renewed annually contingent upon satisfactory academic performance and progress in the program. Typically, a student on this type of funding will serve initially as a graduate assistant or tutor." Hope that helps!