staplerinjello

I looked into Davis after you mentioned it and it's something that they have Mairaj Syed working there who seems to be one of the really exciting new people in Islamic Studies, but i don't know how he would be as an advisor or what who else you would have

And you're right DC is just wayyyy too expensive. i don't know how the colleges there expect students to get by on the stipends they give.

Oh I forgot Chicago and Penn! Chicago is awesome, one of the best, and Penn is good too. I think with these two, we have them all. I think you're picking well with Georgetown, and it's good you're open about the academic future. It may be that you might do better with jobs outside of the US than within the US. Jobs here are tough, but are expanding rapdily in the non-Western world which has developed a massive appetite for English-medium and Western academic standard education.

For Islamic Studies, I'd list Emory, Georgetown, Columbia, Princeton, UCSB (shitty funding and over extended profs/supervisors though), UNC, Indiana, as the best schools for grad study. Of course one could go to other places like Syracuse, Virginia (very odd duck place where Muslim theologians and philosophers hang out, but there's conventional Islamic studies too), USC, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Duke

To the OP: i also saw somewhere you got into georgetown. Doing Islamic studies at Georgetown is first-tier stuff, if you're working with people like Jonathan Brown or the other scholars in that field. I'd say you're better off doing Islamic Studies at Georgetown or Emory than Harvard or Yale or Brown. Islamic Studies is a very odd duck kinda field: it's defined by the work and capacities of a very few significant scholars and those are the people you need to gravitate towards for grad training.

I teach and often have students ask me about funded Master's programs. Could we draw up, or find on the internet, a list of decent universities that fund MA religious studies and humanities MA programs more generally? I feel like this should be a thing on the internet for people who want to take a cautious step towards an eventual PhD

Scripture Interpretation Practice

Got an update on my application from the UVA website. This was followed by an email with details on my offer.

You're welcome. I applied for SIP. You? Best of luck!

For those interested, I just got a reply from UVa. They say they concluded their meeting yesterday and we should be hearing from them early next week.

Anyone else waiting on UVa like me? It's the only school I applied to lol

Is it usual for faculty members in departments to search candidates online and look at their academia.edu pages?

And as for your original question, you come probably become a visiting scholar at some other university during a Cambridge PhD, because I knew we took visiting PhDs from the United States, and I'm sure you could make a stronger case if you were working on manuscripts elsewhere.

It was horrible. There's no real community of Islamic Studies scholars, Tim Winter has very little time and even less guidance to offer, and Islamic Studies is a ghetto in a department that takes theology and philosophy of religion as its core thing. You don't get the benefit of any coursework other than attending the undergrad lectures which are fine for very basic stuff, and that's about all it has to offer. If you wanna study Medieval Islamic philosophy with Tony, that'd be great because he is brilliant, responsive, available, sweet, all of that. If you wanna work outside the div fac, I can't say anything about that. But within the Div Fac, Islamic Studies isn't really a serious thing. Neither are religious traditions other than Christianity more generally. All non-Christian traditions have been study under the idiotic and outdated label world religions. Tim Winter takes on students but I wasn't happy when he supervised me in my MPhil and I know a PhD graduate who feels he didn't really get much from him either; maybe if you wanna work on Sufism he might be interested in you. But I never felt that he came close to being a mentor, or seriously interested in my work despite claiming to find it interesting. You might do better at Oxford with Afifi Al-Akiti. Tariq Ramadan has no time either and isn't interested in taking students. But really, I walked away very disillusioned with British postgraduate education. After an MA at an American school and a Cambridge MPhil, I'd say there's no comparison between a British education and an American one.

You could do so much better than Cambridge, unless you are going there for Tony Street.