
AfricanusCrowther
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Everything posted by AfricanusCrowther
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Ranking or Advisor? What matters most in picking a PhD program?
AfricanusCrowther replied to historyspace's topic in History
Unless either of these institutions is truly renowned in your field (e.g., MSU for African history or Georgetown for Mideast history, which are really rare examples), look at your prospective advisors' placement records. If neither have placed many students, compare funding and research resources. -
Which languages should I focus the most on?
AfricanusCrowther replied to historygeek's topic in History
One way to do this is to think about what burning historical questions you want to answer. Then, think about which region and time period is best suited for answering those questions. This exercise will also help you move beyond “a love of history” as a motivation for a PhD, which is not really sufficient to sustain a dissertation’s worth of research. -
I agree with your advice. I wonder if someone could help this student find resources to work on languages while outside the academy. I worked through a grammar book of Swahili before I applied to programs, and that coupled with some courses from college gave me passable reading knowledge -- of a language I promptly forgot and have never used since coming to graduate school.
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I have referred to everyone in my own institution by their first name from the get-go and haven’t had issues.
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Do top grad schools care about your course load?
AfricanusCrowther replied to MotherofAllCorgis's topic in History
Didn’t matter at all in my case, as far as I know. -
Other strong Africanist programs to consider the next time around: UCLA, Northwestern, UNC (it's a new program there but with great faculty), UIUC, Indiana. BTW, did Cooper retire?
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Ditto. Funding at my program is is constant disarray, thanks to an austerity plan imposed by the trustees. I still think it's valuable to ask as much as possible about funding on your visiting day, if only to suss out these fiscal crises. But once you accept, get everything in writing.
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Here’s an important one, if you work outside the US: what is the grad schcool’s policy on banked semesters for external fellowships? That is, if you win a year-long fellowship (Fulbright, SSRC), do you get an extra year of funding “banked,” or do they just take your money?
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Hi, bitter grad student here to implore you to ask about sixth-year funding on your visiting weekends. Don’t accept vague reassurances along the lines of “well, sixth-year students often find their way to getting funding somehow.” Get a clear answer. Talk to advanced grad students and read the student newspaper/union newsletter if you have to. And treat periods of “austerity” at universities with the utmost seriousness.
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Would it make sense for you to go to this "15-20" rank program if it were your only offer? If so, take it.
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You've been given some suggestions for reading; I would urge you to start there. They address these very questions more thoughtfully than graduate students on a discussion forum can.
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That's definitely true. Sometimes POIs will let you know about these factors in advance (i.e., "we're not taking early modernists this year"), but unfortunately that's not always the case.
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I recommend Sarah Maza's Thinking about History as an impressively sweeping introduction to the academic discipline. She also has a section on distinguishing academic history from popular history.
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Noticing a change in my research interests-- what should I do?
AfricanusCrowther replied to historygeek's topic in History
You should make a plan to acquire the necessary language skills sooner rather than later (not to presume you don't already have them). -
Agreed. One potential question to ask: is this program going to train me to be the historian I want to be? Does it offer the language classes, training, funding, and intellectual environment I think I need? And, on my visiting weekend, did I see evidence of these important aspects of the program? In my own field, HYP&S are generally not the programs that are going to produce strong historians (with important exceptions that admitted students have to keep in mind!).
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Seconded. I've lived in Durham and it's absolutely fantastic.
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True, but then you often run into issues of sample size. In such a tight market, perhaps the only truly safe choice is to go to HYP for their best sub fields.
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Indeed, and the inherent structural dynamics of academia make me wonder if even this is sustainable: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
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Surely there's a better source for this argument than that book. The History Manifesto rests on a now-discredited assertion that the timelines covered by works of academic history have shortened in the past several decades, which they use as a measure for significance and public interest. Not only is this assertion false, but it's also silly: presumably the public is more interested in books about, say, the Civil War or the Holocaust than a 1000-year history of paper weights.
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My advisor told me she didn't think the ideas in my SoP would make for a good dissertation while I was choosing between programs. Sometimes they use the SoP solely as a measure of your historical abilities and understanding even without particularly liking the arguments or proposals.
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This is not a standard part of the admissions process at NU, as far as History goes.
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This varies enormously. Some will read the whole sample carefully, some will read part, some won't read it at all (and will still admit you!).
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Get ready to enjoy this feeling again with grant and job applications!
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I think it makes sense to list courses if you’re applying as an Africanist, unless you have some other kind of African Studies certificate. They’ll want to make sure that you know the lingo for this very exacting and particular field, given that many history department offer little Africanist coursework. I did this on my applications, in part because I felt insecure about not having experience on the continent.
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They'll be looking to see if you know how to talk about historiography. One of the tricks of the trade is that you don't actually have to read all of the literature you're citing (although of course it's desirable) as long as you know generally where it fits on a grid of scholarship about the topic. Recent review articles on the subject should lay this out neatly (I wonder if Marjoleine Kars' 2016 AHR article lays out the lay of the land nicely?). If you can include a footnote that says "For scholarship that views slave rebellions through the prism of A, see: B, C, D, and E; X and Y, by contrast, have recently urged historians to consider Z," then you've done a lot to show that you understand how historical scholarship in general works.