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staplerinjello

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Everything posted by staplerinjello

  1. 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
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. Got an update on my application from the UVA website. This was followed by an email with details on my offer.
  8. You're welcome. I applied for SIP. You? Best of luck!
  9. 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.
  10. Anyone else waiting on UVa like me? It's the only school I applied to lol
  11. Is it usual for faculty members in departments to search candidates online and look at their academia.edu pages?
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. You could do so much better than Cambridge, unless you are going there for Tony Street.
  15. I'm waiting on Virginia. Applied for the PhD. Waiting's not very nice.
  16. hahahaaha i've already had a taste before during my MA. i do agree with your earlier post on reading practices though which i asked for the advice on secondary lit again.
  17. Thanks, this helps, kinda.... I'm wondering though, as a more general question now, how much should one reasonably expect oneself to achieve over the course of a masters and phd program. Is it that important to have everything figured out or to be well on on your way in a promising intellectual direction with a good foundation for it. Sometimes I feel that there is a tendency to associate a certain finality with the learning achieved at the postgraduate level with little consideration for this as a lifelong process. I look at some of the scholars I most respect, and a number of them were fairly young when they got done with the PhD and took years before they finally got stuff sorted in their head and started publishing really valuable stuff. On a separate note, I'm considering working on Royce as a philosphical theologian balancing his theologians concerns and concepts with a particular metaphysical and logical commitment, so I'd like my preparation to lead to that. I also thought Bowie's introduction to German philosophy might be helpful. Nick Adams at Edinburgh also wrote a brief introduction to Kant for theologians that I am considering beginning with.
  18. I'm especially grateful for the reference to Roberts. This is the kind of work I want to transition into. And I agree with you on Weber. The Protestent Ethic was really something, and Kalberg's analysis of it and introduction to it is remarkable as well.
  19. Thanks again, all very helpful. I have a productive few months ahead of me I hope. I'm also getting the reading list from Cambridge for the previous year's MPhil so I can get cracking on it and begin to focus before i get there.
  20. Thank you so much, this was really helpful. Any secondary sources especially by a single author attempting to cover the sweep of the philosophy of religion, christian theology, the jewish intellectual tradition and philosophical theology? I find that reading a single author on a long history often yields powerful insights and a coherent narrative that one can build more easily upon. So for example, any interpretations of the breadth of classical philosophy of religion as you mention and jewish thought? Also any books that identify key Christian and Jewish theological and philosophical concepts that are recurring concepts in their respective traditions? I'm also wondering if there is good work on theological engagement with the social sciences and modern religious studies, whether at the level of its philosophical presuppositions, its method, etc. I know Cantwell Smith and Robert Bellah would probably be good candidates for this.
  21. So, I'm headed off to the UK in the Fall for an MPhil in the Philosophy of Religion but I have about four-five months free from work before that and I want to get a head start. I've approached philosophical issues and topics through scattered reading in philosophy and through philosophical questions in other disciplines but I'd like a more systematic/coherent basic foundation in the philosophy of religion, and to a more limited extent the history of christian philosophical theology and if possible, Jewish "theology"/philosophy as well. I'm looking to begin with a survey texts, maybe read them in conjunction with readers with writings from different authors and then more higher order texts. But I'd like to get a good understanding of the kinds of questions that have conventionally been raised in the philosophy of religion, the different schools that have responded to them, accompanied by an understanding of how these debates have played out over time. So, recommendations? Also, if someone could suggest an intro text on logic and related debates about truth-claims.
  22. Anyone been contacted by the Gates people regarding their application? They say on the website that if you haven't heard from them by mid-March consider that your application is unsuccessful, so I'm wondering how mid is mid-March and whether it's time to give up yet.
  23. I'm considering either of the two programs (Cambridge MPhil Theology and Religion/Oxford MSt Study of Religion) with a research focus on the intersection of theology and religious studies which involves bringing together the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of the social sciences and their relationship with contemporary theology, in the past and the future. The work is meant to be across disciplinary and faith-tradition boundaries. Leaving aside these specifics, and the funding issue, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on either or both of these programs and universities, the course structure, the teaching and research environment, supervision, etc. Anything relevant for an international graduate student.
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