Bumblebea

Yep, happens all the time. I teach a lot of fiction and non-fiction writing by women and African-Americans, and I teach at a predominantly white institution, so I occasionally run across very hostile racist/sexist students. More frequently, I run across students who are just not all that acquainted with minority perspectives, and they feel that by being made to study women's and African-American literature, they are being denied "real literature" or being force-fed an "agenda." Naturally, many students now feel empowered to voice these sentiments (and uglier ones) since last year's election. In any case, I've found it helpful to really structure class and writing assignments very, very carefully. When it comes to material that might be dicey for them, I don't ask open questions in class, and I don't ask them if they agree with this writer or that writer on the topic of sexism or racism. First, I make clear that we need to meet the authors where they're at in terms of their experiences, and that we take seriously their writing about racism/sexism without trying to impose our own experiences. (In other words, I tend to view derailing comments like "so-and-so is just imagining racism where it doesn't exist because he's paranoid" or "As a white person I'm the victim of reverse racism," or "but white people have it hard these days because of affirmative action, and black people have it really easy," as off topic and irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and I steer students away from them.) I also ask them to focus more on techniques the writer is using; their tools of persuasion; their blending of personal experience with academic prose, etc. etc. I occasionally ask my own students to write their own narratives, and to pattern their narratives after the essays we've read by minority authors. I find that when we take the focus off "do you agree racism/sexism exists or that so-and-so is just making all this racism stuff up?" and put it on what and how the author is actually writing, we have more productive and focused discussions. Now, I teach literature and composition classes rather than women's studies or feminist theory, so my approach may not be relevant to what you're teaching. But in terms of writing, I also urge you to structure assignments very carefully. Again, in my own class, I ask very specific questions and guide them to doing a really detailed analysis. Or I have them use one essay as a lens for thinking about the other. And then I lay out very specific criteria for how I'm going to grade the piece. Honestly, this heads off most problems. But you are still going to have students who sit down at their computers and write their own anti-feminist or alt-right screeds. And these essays can be troubling to read. But you just read them and grade them as impartially as possible according to the criteria you've established. These students generally fail themselves. When they do this kind of editorializing, they're usually so far off the mark that it's easy to fail them on technicalities or shoddy argumentation alone. Last year, a student of mine chose to write a paper about a Derek Walcott poem. The assignment asked for a researched, thesis-driven explication. What he gave me was an eight-page anti-immigrant and racist rant that quoted Breitbart, among other things. Well, that was an easy call--he hadn't done what the assignment asked for (nor the proper research), so F. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and xenophobia are such illogical and intellectually bankrupt belief systems that they fail all on their own. Still sucks to read that stuff, though.

I'm not sure if you're interested in MA programs with a concentration in creative writing or MA programs in literature. The latter won't really give you the opportunity to specialize in something as narrow as poetics or poetry because MA lit programs, by their very definition, want you to become well-rounded scholars of literature in a wide array of topics. They lay the groundwork for you to specialize in something much narrower at the PhD level, or to be a generalist instructor at a community college or high school. You may get the option, at the end of it all, to write a master's thesis or master's essay in something much more specific (like poetics), but you won't be able to just take classes in poetry/poetics, for the most part. In terms of fully funded MAs where students also specialize in creative writing, I would urge you to look for MA programs housed alongside PhD programs in creative writing, because these "hybrid" programs might allow you to study (and write) poetry while getting an MA. And because most of these are located in big English departments, they give students funding in exchange for teaching. Just googling gave me these schools: Ohio University Georgia State University of Cincinnati University of Missouri University of Nebraska University of North Texas Texas Tech University of North Dakota University of Southern Mississippi University of Connecticut

I don't think anyone here is worried about YOUR beliefs and whether they'll hold firm throughout a PhD program. We're more reacting to your suitability for graduate work in history. If you dismiss scholars in the same way you've dismissed them here--because an author has an Arabic name--then doing critical historical research might not be a good fit for you. And though you might want to avoid the debate over Liberty's politics right now in this forum, you won't be able to escape the question when you apply for a PhD program. I can guarantee you that, as others have pointed out here, many of the professors on an application committee *will* care where you went to school and may indeed be turned off by a degree from a university such as Liberty. Especially if it produces scholars who dismiss wholesale the authors of historical research solely on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender ... or "whatever."

A few things: 1. If you're at the beginning of your third year, it's definitely not too late to buckle down and find a focus. If you want to do this, then seek out rigorous classes with good professors for your next semester's worth of classes. Think about doing a senior thesis or an independent study, if you're so inclined. 2. I don't know where you're getting the idea that funded terminal MA programs are rare. There are still plenty out there (though they are indeed growing rarer as funding structures keep changing). No, you won't find them at the top schools in the country. But you will find them at large state universities throughout the Midwest and South. I would recommend that you start looking at large flagships or other big universities in those areas. These English departments typically have large and well-developed rhet/comp programs, so they offer funding in exchange for teaching. They're in the not-so-glamorous places of Lafayette, Indiana, or Athens, Ohio, or Oxford, Mississippi, which is probably why people don't talk about them very much. But please don't think that your only options are to either pay for an MA or get into a funded PhD program. 3. In terms of the application materials--writing sample and SOP are most important. But this doesn't make GRE scores or grades UNimportant. The entire application has to be strong.

Almost every school has had a major controversy or ties to controversial figures, so where to even begin? I don't think you'll ever find a university that's "pure" or "unproblematic." I could understand not applying to a certain school out of a need for self-preservation--like if they had a reputation for being unwelcoming of people of my identity. But beyond that, my mileage would vary by the situation. Obviously you don't want the name attached to your PhD to be one that people associate with massive scandal ... but I can say that in higher ed circles no one looks askance at someone with a PhD from Penn State because of Jerry Sandusky, and no one looking to hire you is going to be turned off by your PhD from Penn because Trump graduated from there. When it comes to applying for jobs, I'm picky. I do not apply for jobs at schools with discriminatory practices informed by religion ... and there are actually a lot out there. Every year, several schools post ads where they specify that if you take a job at their university you must sign their "faith statement," and those faith statements often use exclusionary language against LGBT people or non-Christians. Some even prohibit drinking. I don't apply to those jobs and don't give them a second thought.

Just an FYI: If you're applying mainly to English literature PhD programs (and not theater, film, or women's/gender studies programs), you will have to specify the time period you're focusing on. So based on what you've said here, you'd be interested in post-1900 (maybe post-1945???) US Literature, with a more specific focus in gender/sexuality and film/drama. PhD programs sort applications by time periods.

Seriously! I'm trying not to take @Eigen's jab at VAPs personally. After all, I don't want to add to the mountains of projection that are already going on in this thread--especially since the OP did indeed have a valid and interesting question. And one I hope to help them with. I don't want OP to end up in VAP-ville, after all!

Really? Are we really going to go the "appeal to authority" angle? If we are, well, I'm a prof and I understand what @EmmaJava is saying, even if I don't agree that calling oneself "professor" when one has not been appointed as such is an act of fraud. It's clearly not. I do think, though, that we need to be as honest as possible about how universities are functioning, and who is doing the teaching. When I did not have a PhD and was teaching a ton of undergrad courses as a TA, I was always very clear to explain to the students that I was not a professor. I felt it was in their best interest that they have as much information as possible about how the university saw fit to handle their instruction. The literal definition of "professor as someone who professes" was somewhat immaterial in that situation. (How does one define "profess," after all? Clearly not every teacher at a university is a professor, and neither is a PhD teaching at a middle school. Context matters.) (And somewhat unrelated, where I initially taught, the students refused to call PhDs "doctor." They felt that professors were not doctors and did not deserve the title. So "professor" was the best you could do.)

For some reason, the end of my post keeps getting cut off, and it won't let me edit it. So this is the last piece of my advice: There are also a lot of undergraduate journals out there that publish the very best papers by undergrads at various universities. I think these papers are a good model because they are very good--good enough to gain admission at the country's top programs--but also accessible enough that you can figure out how to structure your own papers by looking at them. I found these just by googling: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/anthos/ http://aleph.humanities.ucla.edu/ https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iujur/issue/view/1326 Good luck and keep us posted.

@Doll Tearsheet, I have to say I feel your pain. Throughout undergrad I did well in my English major but did not study with the intention of going for my PhD. In fact, I had very different goals throughout my four years in college, so I didn't seek out the classes or professors that would have pushed me to write more theoretically-inclined and research-heavy papers. When I went to apply for graduate school some years later, I realized that I had few papers that would really fit the bill of a good writing sample. I ended up revising part of my undergrad thesis, but I still didn't know how to turn this into a compelling writing sample (and I was rejected from most programs, both high ranked and more modest). Throughout the entire admissions cycle, I felt totally at sea and woefully underprepared to apply. I was also hanging out in an online community where people were much better prepared than I was and able to deploy the lingo. I was like, "I want to study the poetry of the Irish literary renaissance," and they were like, "I'm interested in how critical race theory intersects with biopower and is simultaneously transformed and displaced by eighteenth-century theories of communal midwifery." And I was like Unfortunately, we all come to this process with varying levels of preparation, and this process very much favors those who were focused enough in undergrad to seek out that preparation, and those who went to schools where that preparation was abundantly available. Part of me really resents the fact that programs expect a very high degree of professionalization from students who have never even set foot in a graduate seminar. But that's the way it is, and things keep getting all the more competitive. Gripes aside, there are a few things you can do, and I'm going to give you the advice I wish I had received. Pick a paper that you've already written--something self-contained. In other words, don't just excerpt your thesis (as I did) unless it's a selection of your thesis that can stand on its own. I would advise that you pick a paper you really enjoyed writing and that felt particularly inspired to you (I know you say you don't have original ideas, but you probably do). Focus on turning this paper into a research paper, not writing a research paper from scratch. Keep in mind that you're actually not supposed to incorporate THAT much outside research. In fact, it's much wiser to keep the focus on your own ideas. Out of a 20-page paper, really only 3 pages should be a lit review (a section that is focused explicitly on laying out past research) and the rest should be your own close reading and ideas with the occasional mention of outside critics or footnotes to tell us how your ideas are different. Having said that, I'm a little surprised at the advice your adviser is giving you, that you should "read all the important critical literature and also be very aware of how [you're] contributing/interacting with it." I disagree with this statement. I don't think you should focus on reading ALL the things. Doing so will distract you from your own thesis, and you'll then be tempted to integrate everything or abandon your original idea. You'll lose your own voice. Instead: Pick two or three articles/book chapters that are relevant to your specific ideas and then use THEIR bibliographies to find the most useful specific historical/critical/theoretical sources. And if a particular work or critic keeps coming up over and over again, it's safe to say that they're probably someone you should cite in your paper. Figure out your critical lens, and focus on a few of the most prominent scholars of that lens. Integrate them into your paper, but do so sparingly. You also say that you're struggling with how to structure this paper. Gregory Semeza's Graduate Study for the 21st Century actually has a chapter devoted to how to structure a seminar paper. It's here.

I wouldn't worry a lot about this. Transatlanticism has been around for a while now, so most programs won't be stymied by a transatlantic writing sample. I was told the same things when I applied years ago--that "you have to choose!" between one continent or the other--but then I hit the job market and, no joke, almost every job was looking for someone with a transatlantic focus. The reason? A lot of programs are looking to kill two birds (or more) with one stone. If they can get someone who can do both British AND American, they're thrilled. Regarding the sample itself--just be sure that your first page and introduction are VERY strong--that's what tends to get read most closely. Go in peace and work on polishing your writing sample.

Correct. Your foreign language ability and experience will have little bearing on your ability to gain admission to a PhD program--unless, of course, you're a Medievalist. Programs are more interested in your writing first and foremost and then your "other variables" second (recs, CV, stats, other things you bring to the table). Foreign language ability, if it matters to them at all, is going to be way, way down on the list. And IME, for most subfields the foreign language requirements are rather easy to fulfill. Mine just required a translation test that was graded rather gently. @Old Bill is correct in pointing out that certain subfields will probably want to see you learn certain languages (Spanish, for instance, if you're studying US Ethnic; French, perhaps, if you're an Anglophone Africanist), but for most grad students it's usually something of a formality.

Keep an open mind about the different classes you take and the different fields of specialization you come in contact with. The MA is a great time to really explore your interests and options. I started off in one time period/national literature and ended up applying to PhDs in a completely different specialization. In other words, you don't want to pigeon-hole yourself as the "contemporary American poetry person" or the "postcolonial Africanist person" too early. For the first year, be really open to all the classes you take and concentrate on generating good seminar papers.

During my first year as a TA, I had a student who, upon learning that he would fail my class due to absences (he'd missed several weeks and all the assignments that were to be turned in during those several weeks for no apparent reason) parked himself inside my office and refused to leave. He also screamed at me, called me a bitch, blocked the door so that I couldn't leave, and engaged in other menacing behavior. I was terrified. I didn't know what to do, and no one in my program had any training for these situations. When I went to tell my department (crying and really upset), they didn't seem to care all that much and just told me to put everything in writing and write an email telling him to withdraw from the class. He withdrew with absolutely no mark on his record. He was able to retake the class to replace the "W" with another grade. I now know that what my department advised was totally, utterly, and completely wrong and devastatingly irresponsible. This student harassed me and violated several aspects of the Student Code of Conduct. He should have been written up and censured (and probably suspended if not expelled), and I wished I'd had the number of the campus police programmed into my phone so that I could have called them immediately when he refused to leave my office. So that's what I would advise all TAs to do (and what I do even now as a professor): 1) Familiarize yourself with the Student Code of Conduct to know how it governs things like student behavior on campus (and most codes of conduct are VERY strict when it comes to students behaving badly toward professors and TAs); and 2) Program the number for the university police into your cell phone. What saddens me the most, to be honest, is that I've occasionally googled this student throughout the years (he had a very distinctive name) to see that his behavior with me was far from isolated. Since "withdrawing" from my class, he's been arrested several times. In 2010 he was arrested for passing bad checks and forging signatures; since then, he's been arrested for assault (he put someone in the hospital) and for leading the cops on a high-speed chase where luckily no one was killed. He was actually from a very wealthy family, and he's not currently in prison. But knowing that his behavior with me was part of a larger pattern that continues to this day really drives home for me how serious it is when students behave this way on campus, and how egregious it is to make TAs (especially female TAs) feel like they are blowing things out of proportion when students act out.

No, there's nothing special about Southern institutions that make them uniquely positioned to grant PhDs about US Southern literature. I mean, if you want to stay in the South, then you really can't do any better than Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, UT-Austin, UNC, or UVa. But on the whole, any program that's strong in American literature more broadly (because that would be your field area--not U.S. Southern lit) will be a good bet. And as echo449 said, the strongest programs are strong regardless of region. As far as the job market goes--there are very few jobs coming available these days. Your limits aren't regional; your limits are that only 15-20 jobs come available every year to begin with.

To be frank, in order to make the connection work you're going to need more than just overlapping methodology or an interest in applying a particular theory. First of all, "postcolonial methodology" is vague--in some ways it's the new historicism of its age. Second of all, The Tempest and the 20th-century American novel (I assume we're talking novels and not plays or poetry) are too far apart temporally, geographically, and generically that you would have to work very hard to justify the idea that writing about one sets you up to specialize in the other. That's why I suggested that the OP try to make specific intertextual connections between The Tempest and some more recent American work--because that would then justify turning in a writing sample about The Tempest. Instead of thinking about applying theory, maybe the OP could think about Renaissance afterlives in the US experience or something like that. At the end of the day, English departments are still sorted by literary period, and in this sense the period about which you're writing trumps your other interests. A writing sample about The Tempest is probably going to get sent to the early modernist for evaluation, not the postcolonialist. (And most departments don't have someone who purely does postcolonial--instead they'll have someone who does U.S. ethnic or some kind of Anglophone-world lit. And those people are not going to be keen on reading a Shakespeare paper.)

Those two areas of study (early modern and 20th-century American) are pretty far afield from each other, and I'm also not sure how you would "plug in" a 20th-century work to your paper about a Shakespeare play. This would be the perfect thing to ask a professor or advisor about, tbh. It occurs to me that you could make a good case for wanting to study how Renaissance tropes are reconfigured by 20th-century literature in ways that incorporate postcolonial issues. I mean, Caliban figures show up all over the place in the 20th century, so there's definitely a connection to be made. Obviously, an MA program is not going to care as much about matching SOPs/writing samples. But a PhD program (especially a very selective one like Vanderbilt) probably will. For an MA program, you just need to demonstrate that you can write, research, and analyze literature in ways that are compelling; for a PhD program, you need to demonstrate that you have some kind of vision and capacity for coming up with a dissertation project. More importantly, the program needs to know your proposed area of study because they tend to admit people by literary time period. Handing in a WS about Shakespeare while you're proposing to study contemporary American lit might confuse them.

If your paper is truly your best, and you're really proud of it and want to send it, then make your SOP fit that paper. In other words, write your SOP so that it forms a bridge between your writing sample and your proposed interests. Or, if necessary, propose interests that line up with your best paper while making it clear you want to explore "other directions." Because to be honest with you, graduate programs are getting additionally picky these days. And while no one expects you to stick with the topic you proposed in your SOP, programs do generally want to see matching SOPs and writing samples. It's difficult to know how to advise you on this without knowing more about your work--does your potential writing sample have ANYTHING in common with your proposed interests? Is there critical/methodological overlap? Are the interests on the same side of the Atlantic but just in a different time period? Or are they in the same time period but from different countries? Are they the same genre? (Poetry? Prose? Essay? Play?) Could they be linked by media (periodical publication? visual text?)?

Both of those are massive red flags for me, TBH. The lack of financial support is especially troubling as we're into May and they still don't have an answer for you. I would strongly urge you to not accept this offer. International MAs are not something I'm familiar with, so you should probably ask someone who has done an MA from another country and then gone to the US for PhD study. I do know a few people who got into strong PhD programs in the US after having gotten MAs from non-UK/Canadian programs (Peking University comes to mind), so I don't think it's a big deal. As far as teaching or presenting--no one is going to care about these things when you're applying. My general feeling is that where you do your MA isn't going to matter much. But you'll still want to check that US programs recognize this university's degree program and are okay accepting people from this particular school.

Yeah, it's an obsession that's pretty rooted in our culture. To give yourself some historical positioning, you might even look at some of the earliest American writers, like the Puritans, who also believed that they were living in the end times and structured much of their literature/belief systems around this.

Off the top of my head--Ohio State, Florida, Maryland, and Kansas has the Gunn Center (http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/)... And to be very honest with you, any program with a strong 20th-century program will be able to support you in science fiction. It's not as off-the-beaten path as it was even 10 years ago (when I started grad school). I know a lot of people who do speculative fiction without a lot of faculty oversight. It's very much a growing field--perhaps because English enrollments are down nationwide and adding science fiction courses has been a way for departments to attract undergrads looking to take a fun elective. I'd actually be surprised if there were that many programs out there that would just say, "No, we don't do that."

You say that you don't want to focus "exclusively" on race (and I'm not sure that anyone does or what you think that would look like) but you also say that you want to study Southern identity and specifically male sexuality/masculinity in Southern literature. Well, as @echo449 pointed out, constructions of Southern masculinity and sexuality are intimately connected to issues of race. I'm not sure how you could make that a focus and not deal extensively with race. It's a bit like studying Milton and not wanting to focus on the religious contexts in which he wrote, or like studying the Irish literary revival and not wanting to deal with the question of Irish nationalism. Having said that, I think you're getting ahead of yourself. No one is required to have a dissertation topic mapped out before they enter graduate school.

To give you a quick answer--you would define yourself as a 20th-21st-century Americanist for the sake of getting into graduate school. Or you might think of yourself as a post-1900 Americanist. I also know people who define themselves as doing American literature post-1945 or pre-1945, if that's a possible dividing line for you. As far as the "art" thing goes--you might identify yourself as someone who's interested in aesthetics. And yeah, you'd have to address race at some point. Race is central to American culture, history, and literature, on both sides of the 1900 divide. Ignore it at your peril.

I could be wrong, but when you're just leading weekly discussion sections (granted these discussion sections are all tied to the same lecture class), it doesn't really count as separate classes. So you wouldn't refer to that as 3/3--that implies three different classes that you design and teach entirely by yourself. That sounds like the life.

I taught at both programs, one course per semester and each and every summer. Most of these classes were classes I taught completely on my own. When I taught composition, I had 25 students per class. When I started teaching literature surveys, I had 50 students per class. I never did the "TA a big lecture class" experience. My first "fellowship" year came when I was working on my dissertation and won a national fellowship. It's definitely doable, but you really have to compartmentalize, and that's hard to do at first because it can take some time to get used to teaching. The most important thing is to keep your eye on the prize and constantly remind yourself that you're there to get a degree, not to bond with undergrads or change undergrad lives. Prioritizing your own work is necessary for survival in a high teaching load program.