cleisthenes

What will get you accepted is a compelling SOP that reflects a really interest and original, if only nascent, interest that could develop into a dissertation topic (not that it actually has to, mind you, but that it *could*). If you do that well, you will be accepted. However, what constitute "interesting" and "original" ideas is not only a tricky business, it is *the* business of being an academic in the humanities. If your professors think your SOP is stellar, I wouldn't stress over your GPA, just apply as broadly as possible while still keeping the programs tightly focused with faculty connections in your expressed subfield of interest. This last point can't be stressed enough: do not apply to any program where there is not at least one really strong connection between you and present faculty, and ideally with faculty and departments outside yours as well. For larger programs, look for even more overlap. In terms of talking to current grad students, this is a great thing to inquire about (i.e.: is Professor X planning to be around at the University or are they retiring/leaving/not taking new students.etc-- current graduate students will be an excellent resource for up-to-date information on faculty which often CANNOT be gleaned from websites, etc.). On a final point, remember that just because you don't have an M.A., you are not necessarily at a disadvantage. Having an M.A., while it presumably gives you more knowledge and skills to work with, raises the bar for your work for that very reason. Anyone reading your work with the knowledge that you hold an M.A. will expect a lot more from it. If you can shine as an applicant with only a B.A., then you're going to be competetive. This is partly because programs prefer to make everyone go through 90% of M.A. coursework when they enter doctoral programs anywhere to reinforce a consistent curricular and pedagogical approach to training you as a scholar (and, erm, maybe some political too). Anyhow, hope that very brief response helps somewhat! Also-- ask around for various opinions. Don't just take my word for it (or anyone's).

I'm in a similar situation to a lot of you. I've only been workign for the company I'm at since last summer, but they've spent a lot of time and energy integrating me into the team, and have made plans way down the line based upon the assumption that I would be there. Well, I won't, because I have a great offer I'm going to take. And moreover, it looks like I'll only be able to work here for three more months at the max. The question is, do I tell them now, and help them facilitate the changeover, or wait and give them only a month, where they won't have the option of replacing me before I'm ready to go (read: ready to give up a paycheck). It's a tough call, and I certainly don't want to screw them over. Then again, I also don't want to work in a hostile/awkward environment or lose my job. Sucks.

Any news? Looks like we're well past the time when they typically give out offers, yet no activity on the results page. Perhaps no one on these boards was made an offer? Any insider info?

I'm still waiting on Chicago, but I'm in a fairly rural part of northern California so that may account for the lag. Man, Yale really dropped the big one today. Boom. Also, echoing an earlier poster, I too am curious about Pton- anyone heard anything? I'm guessing Columbia and Harvard are done with their initial round (if there is even a second round?), based on the postings. Cheers.

Bingo. I'm not in English, but when I was accepted to a PhD program at an Ivy+ this year, I actually asked the DGS about this very issue. She chuckled and told me that, in fact, it was something she had recently been discussing with her "colleagues at Ivy institutions," and she conveyed that the general consensus is that what you present of yourself, you should present in your application packet. Humanities departments are not looking to make their decision based on you as a person. They are looking to make it based on you as a scholar. Your application is your representation of yourself as such. Any contact on top of that, I was made to understand, is not only superfluous, but runs the risk of creating precisely the impression that the above poster was worried it might--that of an irritating, under-confident candidate who doesn't believe their application is strong enough and feels the need to supplement it in some way. Moral of the story: if you do not come to a situation where you feel you have an ORGANIC reason to contact a particular professor in a department to which you plan to apply, then don't. It won't help you, and it could hurt.

Sure, they may not "take away the money," but what if they start paying you in IOUs? California is *insolvent*. It's not about honor. It's about basic economics.

Has your department given out the first round of offers yet? If not, do you know when they plan to?

As someone who has worked in the field of anglophone Nazi-era cultural history quite a bit, I can tell you that most scholars writing in English and referring to Nazi terms actually *leave them in German*. You can certainly offer a translation, but unless it's a particularly obscure term, you should footnote that translatation and your explanation of its relevance rather than worrying about complete clarification. In many cases, if you're dealing with a term that's widely known, then it's not necessary to translate or make mention of the term's meaning at all. Most historians can read German, and historians of modern Europe definitely can.

The Art History Newsletter had some good stats collected: http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=476 http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=483 Interesting to compare perceived prestige/size/placement success, as it's somewhat counter-intuitive for me in a couple of instances.

Differs from school to school and department to department.

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a myth. As baby boomers retire, their tenured professorships are, more often than not, now replaced by adjust positions or eliminated all together. Before the recession, most departments were shrinking in terms of tenured faculty. Now, most schools either have a hiring freeze or are looking at cutting positions. Meanwhile there are many, many more PhDs on the market every year (and this is only somewhat mitigated by the smaller cohort sizes in the last couple of years-- there is so much "build-up" of PhDs that every new degree-holder is competing with a vast field of unemployed scholars who have graduated in previous years and been flitting from visiting position to adjunct position to unemployment. This is the state of the field. Given the current system, there is no indication it's getting any better. And there's no massive baby boomer retirement on the horizon. You should adjust to that idea before you embark on graduate study with a misconception about what's awaiting you at the end. Edit: I should say that this is true for the humanities as well as social sciences and to some degree hard sciences, but since there is MUCH more funding for the latter two, especially hard sciences, plus the fact that there is much more of a prospect for desirable employment for hard science PhDs outside the academy, humanities is really by far the worst.

Actually, it looks 1370's-ish Any scholars of medieval costume on these forums want to give a more specific date range?

I think mitzy's points are very well taken. I should step back and say that my experience is limited to the educational background I come from. Even though I never did a capstone or honors project, and thus never wrote a thesis-level paper as an undergrad, my program was extremely rigorous and upper-level coursework was typically on par with what one might expect at the graduate level (this is according to my professors, but also just my comparing with friends who are AT graduate programs). At least, to get an A in seminar, one really needed to produce work that could stand up to scholarly critique, which is very different from just writing a "good" undergraduate paper. I also knew that I wanted to study at history before I was at undergrad, thus I took courses from my freshman year on. I practically had enough art history credits for two B.A.'s. Although because my department was very small (only 4 tenured professors, none of whom specialized in my subfield), I never actually took a course in what I actually want to study. Most of my courses in which I worked on my core focus were actually in other departments, which was one way I compensated for that dearth in my AH curriculum. This didn't stop me from gaining admission to study the very thing that I had no experience with through coursework. Someone coming from a background where they don't have as much AH and didn't feel they produced work on the graduate level (and thus have both a graduate-level writing sample and professors able to attest to the level of undergraduate thinking) would definitely be served by an M.A. But if you read independently and are able to produce an SOP and writing sample that reflect the knowledge you have gained on your own (and this is the essence of graduate school and scholarly work, anyway), then my feeling is that it's really unnecessary to have that extra certification (which is what an M.A. actually is). What you need to know as a scholar you will learn in Ph.D. programs, whether or not you have your M.A. One thing I would say is that if you have teaching experience and positive evaluations as an MA student, that can't hurt ultimately if you're looking to work at an SLAC or another teaching-intensive institution. I do still fail to see how two M.A.s is better than one if your goal is to work in academia. First, there's the cost. If you're funded it's one thing, but how many people get funded MAs in the humanities to begin with, let alone in art history? Sure, if you get your first M.A. in a totally unrelated field and suddenly have an existential sea-change and decide to study art, I could understand that. But if your goal is to teach art history, it seems a long, roundabout way to reach it. Given the state of employment in the field, graduate schools are concerned that you have the gumption not just to make it through, but to find a good job afterword that will put you in a position to reflect well on their program (and hire their graduates when you're tenured). Although I'm sure there are many, many exceptions to this, the more unrelated topics you pursue before eventually going after the Ph.D., the less you look like a candidate who is going to devote all of their professional (and, frankly, a huge chunk of personal) energies toward art-historical ends. Again, there are many exceptions, but with so many applicants for so few positions, and even fewer jobs, there really isn't a whole lot of breathing room for experimentation. Again, though, I think mitzy has great points and I would generally agree with the thrust of them. Cheers.

Short answer is no. Most programs don't interview. But every department is different. Every year is different too, for that matter. I could envision a scenario in which the committee was really deadlocked between two candidates and decided to conduct interviews to bring in another layer of data. There are too many problems with interviews for them to become a regular thing. The major one is the issue of meeting face-to-face: a phone interview is hard to arrange between multiple people, and if it's just one-on-one, then it's one faculty member's opinion of you. That's not in keeping with the way graduate admissions works-- it's always a discussion between more than one member of the faculty, all of whom have some degree of familiarity with your application. Sure, they could fly you out and interview you the way they do in a lot of social sciences programs, but that doesn't seem to be the way it's ever worked, and in academia, in case you haven't noticed, status quo counts for a lot. Hope that's helpful.

Well, I applied with only a B.A. and so far have been admitted to the only program I've heard back from (though I suspect I may not have been so successful at a couple of others, which seem to have notified with top choices already). I would say that an M.A. is only a good idea if you weren't an art historian as an undergraduate. If you did significant research in art history as an undergrad, took lots of courses, and feel that you're up-to-breast with the current debates in the field to the degree that you can effortlessly convey that understanding between the lines of your SOP, then there's no point in doing an MA. In fact, if you come in with an MA at many programs, you will get less funding, while not necessarily being able to skip out of certain curricular requirements. Having MORE than one M.A. makes it look like you're just unfocused and not certain you want a career in academia. Just food for thought.

I concur with the previous poster. Mentioning scholars whose work has been influential for you is fine, and certainly won't hurt you (unless of course their work is somehow opposed or irrelevant to the approaches/concerns of the particular department that is reading your app, but I doubt that's the case if you're focused in the schools you've chosen to apply to). What can HELP you is to have that specificity in singling out each program individually, which has already been mentioned here. So if you didn't do that, it's something to add for next time, assuming there is a next time. But just mentioning other scholars in different programs is not likely to hurt you.

My partner was admitted to an extremely competitive program at Berkeley (humanities), and they haven't given funding info yet but they are reimbursing flights up to $400, which is $50 more than UChicago offered her! So perhaps that says something about the relative financial positions of different departments.

all of what you say is true, but your numbers are high in my opinion. if you live in an extremely expensive place where you drive a great deal in an inefficient car and eat out a lot, then perhaps. look, as a grad student living in an expensive part of the country, i will have a stipend of about 23k. That has to cover all of the expenses you list there. Luckily I live with my partner who has similar funding, so cumulatively we gross around $45k, which ends up being what we net too because that's poor enough not to pay much in taxes. but taht is manageable for us because we are frugal, we cook for ourselves and rarely eat out unless absolute necessary, we drive a fuel-efficient car that we purchased from money we saved from grants and awards that the two of us won, etc. etc. (By the way, if you can't win grants and awards, I wouldn't recommend going into the academy, as you really WILL have a hard time financially.) Now, if we had children or were ill and needed lots of medical care/medications, if we had to make car payments because we bought an expensive new car instead of a cheap, reliable old car. If we went to movies instead of watching them on netflix, etc. etc., then yes, it would be hard. Life choices. If you want one thing, it often makes it hard to have another.

$90,000/year would be enough to pay off a $2,600 monthly payment if you live alone and have minimal expenses. Assuming you're grossing about $65,000 and paying $31,200 per annum, that leaves about $30,000 to cover things like rent and food, which, if you're not buying jetskis left and right, is wayyy more than enough.

A good friend of mine was admitted to a UMN program and nominated for a Graduate School University fellowship. The POI from the dept candidly stated the financial situation is dire, however. They did however state that even if my friend did not receive the fellowship, the department would fund them for 5 years to a certain extend (not full, but about 60-70% of full). They gave an exact number.

I would be quite shocked if there were no funding for graduate students. It's economically illogical. Graduate students cost relatively little in comparison to real professors, even adjunct ones, and yet usually take on a large undergraduate teaching load. The undergraduates are the ones that bring in the money (especially now, after berkeley has raised tuition 30%). Why would you NOT continue to accept graduate students as cheap teaching labor? Certainly, I have friends that have been admitted to other departments, although I admit their funding offers haven't arrived yet. It will be interesting to see what happens. But you have to think about this in an economic way: the more grad students they have, the higher enrollment, the more income.

Anyone applying? Anyone heard anything back? Looks like in past years they have notified via Phone late January, or possibly by email around this time in Feb? Oh waiting, what a foul beast!

Ahh, violence is one of zizek's best (though definitely not one of his more rigorous). I particularly love his discussion of divine violence.

A depressing statistic from CAA: In 2010, "...job postings in art history [will see] an overall decline of 36.9" percent. (Jobs = tenure-track positions.) From: http://www.collegeart.org/features/jobstatistics That's after a 14.7 percent decrease in 2009. And it's not like there was a glut of jobs before then.