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I accepted Stanford's offer this morning.

I posted several pages back about my experience but, in brief, I got rejections last year but tried again this year and now have great options. The rejections hurt and waiting a year was difficult, but I think a lot of it came down to how I presented myself through my materials, who was on admissions committees, and other factors that aren't strictly based on merit. Try not to take it too hard!

I haven't heard anything yet. I'm also very curious. Any insight into cost of living in the area? The example stipends they mentioned (for TAs, RAs, or students on fellowships) may not vary much in absolute terms, but those "small" differences are pretty significant when that's how one would get by.

Samer Alatout at Wisconsin is someone who comes to mind. Note that he lists biopolitics and Foucault among his areas of interest. http://dces.wisc.edu/people/faculty/samer-alatout/ You might also consider looking into people doing research on surveillance. Foucault obviously does important work beyond Discipline and Punish, but these people know that. I'd take the advice about philosophy programs with a grain of salt. Philosophy in the US is very heavily slanted toward analytic philosophy. The boundary between the analytic and continental traditions is blurry and there are people who cross it, sure, but analytic philosophy by and large is concerned with problems and methods that will not be conducive to your interests. I also encountered a lot of disdain for the continental tradition, of which Foucault, to be clear, is a part. The continental philosophers in US philosophy departments also don't tend to use continental theorists in the same way that people in sociology, political science, gender studies, comp lit., etc., do: again, academic philosophy is focused on different problems.

Another thing to consider with one-year MA programs is that if you try to apply to PhD programs that year, faculty at the MA school, in most cases, will only have known you for a couple of months. You may not be able to get new letters until a subsequent application cycle. I believe Chicago recommends waiting another year so that you finish the program in the summer and then apply after 12 months of study with their faculty. I don't have any firsthand experience with any of these programs, however. I've been told students who go through MAPPS at Chicago don't end up getting PhDs at Chicago, but the program claims to have good placement rates. I met one person who went through NYU's MA program and then got a PhD offer from them, but can't really speculate as to whether the MA helped. Otherwise, I don't know where NYU and Columbia send people.

(I tried to register a while back but my account was never approved. I hope that despite the size of this thread this will still reach people who might be helped by it.) I applied to twelve programs at ten schools last year with what I felt was a strong record: a good GPA, highish GREs, strong letters, previous graduate courses, and a few co-authored papers in revision, submitted, or in preparation. I also had some work/research experience in a related field. That application cycle didn't go well. I didn't get into a single PhD program. I nearly began an expensive, unfunded master's program, thinking it would make the difference in subsequent PhD applications, but circumstances intervened and it wasn't possible. Instead of starting the master's program, I waited a year and tried again. I applied to more schools than last year, as well as to a wider range of schools in terms of both rankings and areas of emphasis. I felt I had tried to tailor my applications to each program last year, but this year I really agonized over each one, despite applying to so many more this time; that's my answer to the earlier application quality/quantity debate here. At their suggestion, I talked more with letter writers about how my materials and their letters should be framed so we would all be on the same page. Theory had been a big part of my statements last year, which I thought my record would support; but this year I dialed it back and focused on interests that aren't necessarily trendy but also aren't as marginalized. This time I've gotten into several programs, including a couple that rejected me last year. Don't give up, guys. It's an expensive, difficult, isolating process, and waiting a year can be a huge blow emotionally (it was for me), but fashions, committees, and applicants' interests change from year to year. I stayed involved with research to stay sane and to buffer the urge to throw in the towel, and I tried to present my year off as a strength because I had time to really weigh whether this is what I want to do. I don't know which of these changes helped, or if this year is just different, but things are going better the second time around.