Ramus

I was apprehensive about this when I was weighing options last year, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover it wasn't nearly as awkward as I imagined. When I was admitted to UMD off the waitlist, I emailed Ralph back and mentioned that UMD was one of my top choices and that I was really only considering it and two other schools. In that same email, I did mention I was a bit concerned about the UMD stipend given the high cost of living in the DC area. Ralph asked me to send him the year-by-year breakdown of my other stipend packages, and within a week he got back to me with a counteroffer. This first counteroffer wasn't dramatically higher than the base package, which Ralph acknowledged. Another couple of weeks after that, he bumped up the offer again, making it directly competitive with my other offers. And while I ultimately declined UMD's offer, I really appreciated how flexible and straightforward Ralph was with me. So, this is all to say that negotiating can be potentially awkward and uncomfortable, but UMD makes it as painless as possible.

Ah, thanks for the correction. I was working from memory, but it turns out my memory isn't all that good.

If you're talking about raw stipend numbers (i.e. not accounting for cost of living), surely NYU has to be near the top. I seem to remember that their award includes a base stipend plus a substantial fellowship award on top of that, totaling, if I remember correctly, nearly 45K. But, then again, you'd be in New York, so it really wouldn't feel like you're taking home that much each year. Fellowships similar to the Vanderbilt ones crop elsewhere too, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. Last year, UConn of all places offered me a multi-year fellowship of right around 35/year. I imagine other similarly ranked programs have comparable university-wide fellowships.

As far as I know, the base package is still free tuition + health care + 16K with a 1/1 teaching load. If the fellowship doesn't come through, that'll be their offer. If you want the skinny on anything specifically related to the early modern program and/or faculty, feel free to PM me.

You'll get more details when you get a phone call from Aman Garcha, so keep your phone around you for the next few days. If you're up for fellowship, which, as others have said, is probably the case if you were admitted this early, then your name is submitted to the Graduate School, which controls all the university-wide fellowships. Now, I have to say that being considered for the university fellowships isn't the same as being awarded one (as I initially believed). I gather that last year only about half of the department's suggestions for fellowships were approved by the graduate school. I don't say this all freak you out or let you down. You've reason to be optimistic, but know that it's not a sure thing yet.

You can see for yourself by checking out this link: http://english.rice.edu/Job-Placement/. Unlike a lot of department placement pages, this one doesn't hide the fact that not all of its graduates get tenure-track jobs. I, for one, really appreciate this transparency, and I think it will give you a pretty accurate sense of what your job prospects would be after graduation.

It's fine. "A black mark" would be closer to, say, the 25th percentile. Even then, some schools wouldn't care.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't think schools are trying to dupe you. "10-20 pages" doesn't mean "only a moron would submit a ten-page paper"; it means "we realize you may not have written a seminar paper, but you've almost certainly written something over ten pages; send us that." Submitting a 15 paper would be fine for either of the two ranges you mentioned. And, in general, I think it's a terrible idea to drag out a paper simply so that it can be longer. That's a hallmark of bad prose. Keep it short and sweet. The adcom will be grateful.

Hmmm. I heard a paper given by Ryan Netzley (Southern Illinois) that used Deleuze to think about George Herbert. While you might not be interested in Netzley, you might read check his CV, track down a pertinent essay of his, and see what other critics he's leaning on or speaking to in that essay. This involves a bit of work, but it might help you find someone you'd want to work with.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you can't know who exactly will be evaluating your application, and what the individual admissions committees will value. Maybe the committee will be made up of largely rhet/comp people who will overlook that score, but it could just as easily be comprised of literature people who will see that score as a big red flag. (And this is assuming that all rhet/comp faculty really downplay the GRE score and all literature people really value the score, which probably doesn't square with reality.) Unless the graduate program is explicit about how they conduct admissions (and very few are), you can't know who will look at your application or what they'll prioritize, and everything will vary program to program. What I do know is that your score verbal score is in the 50th percentile of all GRE verbal scores, meaning that it is average among a group that includes the scores of those who in no way specialize in language and communication. I think it's reasonable to say, then, that your score would actually look well below average to anyone on an admissions committee, regardless of their specialization. And for that reason, it's worth taking the test again. You don't want to take a chance that something a silly as a standardized test score might impede your admission to graduate school. I wouldn't want to take that chance, anyway.

Berkeley and Columbia are good, of course, as are the other schools in the top ten or fifteen. UCLA should not be a "fallback" on anyone's list, and is really a "reach" school for everyone who applies there. In general, UCI is good but not great for early modern studies. It's hard to say if you can get into any of those schools with a BA from an unranked state school. It's not unheard of, but I think it'll be a disadvantage to you. (Others will disagree with me on this point.) Higher Ed places a high premium on prestige, and that's not lost on the admissions process. People getting into those top programs straight out of undergrad usually have earned their BAs at top private schools or highly ranked state schools. This general truth is not without exception, and I'm sure others will pipe up here with their own anecdotes complicating what I've said. But all else being equal (test scores, WS quality, quality of LORs, etc.), you'll likely lose out to the candidate that got her degree from a better school. Fair or not, prestige matters. Now, I realize that sounds like a lot of doom and gloom. But there's a viable alternative to the "top-PhD-or-bust" model you've described: applying to a least a couple of lower ranked, stand-alone MA programs that are fully funded. A number of schools in the Cal system offer this deal, as do a number of the big but less prestigious state schools, schools like Delaware, Alabama, Auburn, Ole Miss -- places like that. (Alabama is especially good as an MA program for EM studies, since they have a private endowment set up to give EM students an additional stipend.) These programs would give you a good opportunity to figure out what grad school and scholarship is really all about, and they do this without sending you 50K into debt, as will some of the cash cow MA programs at top schools (UChicago, Columbia, UVA, etc.). I realize this option doesn't have the sex appeal of a top program, but I think it's the best route for a lot of folks. In addition, it puts you in a better position to make that jump to a top school if you still want to apply after you finish the MA in two years. The down side is that the teaching load at these schools is greater than you'll ever see at a top 30 school; a 2/2 load is not uncommon, and a 2/1 load is usually the best case scenario. But given the choice between a mountain of debt and a heavier teaching load, I'd take the latter every time.

Not terrible advice, although I would not spend all that much time at all on pre-1500 stuff (except Chaucer "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" -- you'll need to read Chaucer in ME, so read over the General Prologue to refamiliarize yourself with the language). You'll get a question or two on OE stuff, but, as I say above, you can more or less figure that out by identifying words that look like MnE. The year I took the test there was, rather bizarrely, an obscure passage from Margery Kempe. I wasn't prepared for it, nor were some of my medievalist friends who took the same test. But in all honesty, if I were to take the test again knowing there was going to be a question about Margery Kempe on there, I still wouldn't read the Book of Margery Kempe for the sake of that question. It's simply not worth the effort to review a lot of other non-Chaucerian pre-1500 literature in order to be prepared for the lone question you get on it. You're better off directing your efforts elsewhere, to areas and topics the test has weighted more heavily (like early modern lit, for example).

Last year there was one, maybe two questions on Old English. At the time, I hadn't taken OE, and so really didn't have any clue what to expect. But the questions turned out to be remarkably easy. Although the passage included on the test looked a little funny, it was pretty easy to render into MdnE by simply sounding it out and fiddling with some of the consonants. Here are a couple of examples of the type of passage ETS will give: Þæt wæs god cyning. (Beowulf) Her Sigeric wæs gehalgod to arcebisceope, and Eadwine abbod aforðferde, and Wulfgar abbod feng to þam rice. (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) It might help to know that Þ and ð are OE characters that we'd both write as 'th,' and that usually you can translate æ as a simple 'a' in MnE (at least in these examples). But even if you didn't know that, you could still fumble through these. In the first example, wæs looks like MnE 'was,' and it turns out that's what it meant in OE, too. (Go with your gut instinct on these.) 'god' could be 'God,' but you don't need to know OE to guess that it might alternatively be 'good' (and it is). 'cyning' is certainly the most difficult in the line, but we have a 'c' that could be a 'k' and an 'ing'. What do you think it is? If you guessed 'king', you're right. The line means 'That was [a] good king.' The second passage is a bit more challenging, but I still think it's manageable. Remember that you don't have to know each and every word -- ETS will give you answers that'll help you make educated guesses on the stuff you can't figure out. So let's try this one out. 'Her' looks like 'Here' (referring to the year in the Chronicle). 'Sigeric' is capitalized, so we might guess that it's a proper name. 'Wæs,' again, looks like 'was.' Don't spend too much time on 'Gehalgod,' but it might help if you remember from grammar that passives in the past tense are formed by "was/were" + a past participle. 'To' is identical to modern 'to' in all but pronunciation, and 'archbisceope' looks an awful lot like 'archbishop.' Let's just try translating that much: "Here Sigeric was [something] to archbishop.' It's not perfect, but we can probably guess what 'gehalgod' is from the context. Maybe something like 'named' or 'appointed'? (It's 'consecrated'.) People sometimes get 'appointed' to an archbishopric, but they don't often get 'stabbed' to an archbishopric, right? Again, make an educated guess. So, this is all to say: Don't worry about the OE stuff. You can figure it out. The only thing that might be worth memorizing is the stuff on the unique characters I mentioned above.

Unless you retake the GRE, you probably won't be competitive at the first five schools you've listed. You need a score at or above 164, or right thereabouts.

This is just as pointless as the suggestion that RhetComp folks aren't real academics. What's the use in dismissing out of hand large swaths of academic work? It's facile and anti-intellectual.

Yeah, you're probably right about that. I had thought DDD's question about the drop-down menu was really one about being clear what their subfield is. That was careless thinking on my part.

It could possibly affect who reads your application, but it will certainly affect how you are "categorized" by the adcomm. If you select 20C, you'll be treated as a 20C applicant, and the same holds if you select theory. So it matters quite a bit. Couldn't tell you which one would be "smarter or more competitive," though. That's going to depend on the particular school and the particular application year.

Routledge recently (I think?) put out Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, which isn't a bad place to start. It has foundational works from the 60s-90s and a number of readings from the past ten years.

No, it won't. Shakespeare will always a huge part of early modern study, so don't be worried about that. I am, however, a bit more concerned about you trying to present this thesis as the seed of your graduate study. While the thesis sounds like a lot of fun, I'm not sure how many programs would look at a Weberian reading of politics in Shakespeare as really innovative. But more to the point, it would be hard to link this project up with current scholarly trends—and I can't overstate the importance of doing that in your applications. Weber isn't hot or new, nor is reading politics in Shakespeare. This isn't an attempt to poo poo on your thesis or your methodology, far from it. I just want you to know that you'll need to figure out a way to get this project "to speak" to current scholarly trends. You might be successful in the application season even if you don't do that, but you'll need to do so if you want to be competitive for the really top programs. But to your question: if you're interested in Renaissance (I use this interchangeably with 'early modern,' as I think most people do now) drama, you can look just about everywhere. Almost every doctoral program is going to have someone that works on Shakespeare & Co. If you want to restrict yourself to Ren drama and politics, the field narrows a bit. UCLA is a pretty good option.

Could you be more specific about your interests? What about the period do you like to study? This will help me and others offer recommendations. You can also take a peek at last year's thread on the Renaissance. There was some discussion of individual programs in there.

I do not understand how you can dismiss one's means of conveying content as a matter of secondary importance. Just my two cents. #Communication101

Bradin Cormack's been there for only a year or two. Before that, he was at UChicago for about a decade. I don't know how many people in EM studies more broadly know him, but he's pretty well known among those who work on law and literature. His monograph is one of the more widely cited ones in that field from last decade. Recently, he has started to move away from the law stuff and started working on the Renaissance trivium and its relation to ontology (so said his faculty page last year). I haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet, so I think he's still in the early stages of the project. If memory serves, Nigel has actually published a bit on EM women's writing. You can double check that on the MLA Int'l Bib, but I think that's right. I'd probably get in touch with him instead of Cormack if I were you.

You might check out Paul Fussell's Poetic Form & Poetic Meter. It's a quaint old work in the New Critical vein, the first text that I used for learning form. I remember liking it a lot when I first read it, though I admit I haven't returned to it in some time. It isn't quite the concise, bulleted-list I think you're looking for, but it covers almost all of the formal stuff the GRE will test you on.

Doesn't really happen, at least not two non-consecutive historical periods. You can find a lot of people doing medieval and Renaissance, for example, or medieval and theory X. But you won't find someone who does what you're talking about. That's mostly a consequence of how deeply entrenched periodization is in the field. There are other reasons too, but I think that's the biggest reason why. For the purposes of the application, you'll just need to pick one. You can always change when you get to a program, or you can retain the second field as a side interest, one which you can write on later in your career.

I probably found value in and agreed with VM's remarks for longer than just about anyone else, but I'm with WT, uncertain now about the value of continually rehashing this. Moreover, I worry that going about your campaign in this way, VM, makes it easier for others to dismiss the very thing you're trying to get across. For me, you're beginning to come across as a cranky old man, scaring people away from your porch (and others have arrived at this well before me). You've become a caricature. And, again, I'm someone who agrees with much of what you've said. It might be time to ask whether you're doing more harm to your cause than good.