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claritus

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Everything posted by claritus

  1. To play devil's advocate, while there are problems distinct to Comparative Literature, I think there are some significant upsides as well. I'd also say it comes down to your personal goals & strategy, particularly in the long run. If you are dead set on working in a Comp Lit program after graduation, I don't think it's a wise decision—the same goes for smaller language departments. However, I can think of many recent hires in English departments who have come from Comp Lit. At Berkeley, for example, I think around 7-8 of our junior faculty members (a significant majority) have PhDs in Comp Lit, rather than in English. Off the top of my head, I would say that similar trends are visible in other comparable departments, with Princeton and Chicago coming to mind. There are various reasons for this, including broad transnational turns in the field, which I can't really go fully go into. I'd say that in many cases the additional language training does help candidates stand out. However, this isn't really beneficial unless there is a significant and/or central Anglophone component to their work. So the proper strategy seems be to work in Comp Lit, but with an eye towards English jobs—i.e. work with a mentor who does Anglophone work, but have a secondary mentor or co-advisor in another language. There's also a lot to be said for working in non-Western languages, particularly Asian languages and Arabic, as well as Indigenous languages. Whether or not Comparative Literature itself is expanding as a discipline, the expansion of subfields like Asian American, Native American, and "Global Anglophone" has opened space for comparatists in other ways.
  2. I'm going to jump in and say that German is pretty huge in the period! You'll have a hard time avoiding Hegel and German Idealism, as evidenced by a text like Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Likewise, if you have any interest in George Eliot you'll be hard pressed to avoid Feuerbach, since she translated much of his work into English. French is useful, of course, but I don't think it has nearly the same impact philosophically as German. Aside from Hegel and Feuerbach, we're talking Schiller, Kant, Goethe, Freud, Nietzsche...
  3. I'm not a Victorianist, but I know that they lost Andrew Miller to JHU a year or so ago, alongside Mary Favret (who is a Romanticist, but still a very significant loss). Obviously it remains a strong department for Victorian Studies, but I imagine they're doing a little bit of rebuilding right now.
  4. Officially declined PhD offers from JHU and Brown yesterday, as well as an MA offer from UBC. Hope this helps someone!
  5. I've also accepted my offer from Berkeley! Super excited about the program—it really felt right during the visit. @imogenshakes Glad to see you accepted the offer from Davis! You might have to take the train down to Berkeley for a seminar
  6. It's obviously not radically efficient, but I've found that going through dissertations on ProQuest—sorted by advisor/committee—gives you a fairly good idea of placement statistics, provided you do a little bit of google followup. Research quality is a lot harder to figure out, especially since it's subjective, but I try to follow the significant journals and imprints in my field. Special issues of journals and published roundtables are incredibly helpful (in my opinion) because they frame/are framed by immediate scholarly conversations. Obviously there will be bad and good work in each case, but the more important part is having an idea of who is involved in the conversations, and where they're writing from.
  7. I was not able to attend, but it was scheduled for this week.
  8. Hi all, I expect to decline an offer from Brown this week.
  9. Not really, no. I don't know where you are getting your stats, but they have placed numerous grad in TT positions over past the past two years. And while CUNY does have some excellent faculty members, the quality of work of those at Harvard is pretty undeniable, at least in terms of pedigree. It's really not about frequency of publication; it's about the quality of journals and academic presses. Likewise, while Rhet-Comp and Digital Humanities are "hot," that doesn't necessarily translate to rankings. In particular, Rhet-Comp is not even always considered to be part of these rankings, which are focused on Literary Studies. Moreover, while Harvard isn't great re. Digital Humanities, people like Leah Price, Philip Fisher, and Deidre Lynch are at the forefront of other "hot" fields like Book History and Affect, so I don't think your characterization of the department as outmoded is totally fair. I get where you're coming from—I wouldn't want to attend Harvard, at least not for my subfield. It doesn't have the same sort of dynamism or sheen as some of the other programs in the top 10, and some of the prominent faculty members are close to retirement. That being said, they will always be able to make good hires, the faculty will always have publications with a golden pedigree, and no matter how conservative the department seems, they will still have grad students who go on to do amazing work. Think of people like Namwali Serpell and Sianne Ngai, Jared Hickman, Holger Syme, etc... No arguments against CUNY being a great program, but it really doesn't have the same profile as Harvard.
  10. You can follow me if you can find me I think I've probably left enough of a paper trail here...
  11. PhD or MA? And are these American programs? If the second choice is asking for any sort of decision by March 15 (and they're American) it's pretty fucked up. The standard April 15th date exists for a good reason—diverging from it to add undue pressure to admitted students is shitty and you should email them saying that (in a more formal manner, of course). That being said, you could also email the first choice and tell them about the second—it could potentially force their hand on acceptance and funding. Either way though, second choice is, uh, not behaving well. If you accepted them now and then reneged later on based on a better offer from first choice, I wouldn't feel guilty at all. They're not doing anything illegal, of course, but it's really bad academic etiquette to force an admitted student's hand based on funding.
  12. One sort of counterintuitive piece of advice I'll give is JOIN TWITTER. There is a fantastic academic community, and it has definitely helped me keep up with changes in the field. Follow scholars, journals, departments, other organizations, etc. I've been on the platform for a few years now, and though I won't try to make some sort of causal connection between that and my acceptances, I've definitely come in contact with some great scholars, and also given access to some rad (otherwise paywalled) resources. Some newer journals and organizations (V21, Post45, and postmedieval—for example) also solicit for papers/articles/reviews from their followers. I'll also say that aside from all the potential career & academic benefits, it's just enjoyable. Scholars are hilarious, human people; interacting with them in this context really shows you that.
  13. I tried to be fairly practical & straightforward. So essentially I gave a brief description of my research interests, aligned them with the work of the POI in question, and then asked if they were available to work with students/whether they felt the program would be a good fit for me. There's no need to go overboard—really you just want to portray yourself as engaged & amiable.
  14. Don't be afraid to email POIs. I get fairly anxious about this sort of thing, so I only ended up emailing people at two schools. Those ended up being 2/3 of my acceptances. That said, the two faculty members in question are my dream supervisors, so it all worked out, but I was definitely gambling. There is definitely a lot to be gained from getting in contact with POIs, even if it's only a brief, friendly exchange. Wyatt's beat me to it
  15. Yes, and things really change in those years—we're talking financial crisis, job market collapse level change...
  16. There's a weird fetishization of the HYP (Harvard-Yale-Princeton) triad, by means of which people tend to ignore Cornell, Brown, and Columbia. They're still definitely Ivy Leagues, but don't come with the same sort of hype. That doesn't really have much to do with their worth in terms of graduate programs though. They all have amazing faculty/programs, and I think Cornell and Columbia probably have better placement records than Princeton, for example. Also UPenn, which also gets passed over sometimes in terms of "Ivy League reputation," has done phenomenally well in terms of job placement recently, rivalling any other top program. I think the other programs you listed, aside from perhaps Emory, are all top tier as well. Which isn't to say that Emory isn't an amazing program, I'm just not sure that it has the same reach as the others in terms of reputation. I'd also throw UCLA, Northwestern, UT Austin, Rutgers (especially for Victorianists) and Johns Hopkins into a list of the "top-tier," though it varies—as people have said—by period/subfield.
  17. Wish I could be of more help! I think the results board works out quite well for us Lit folks, due to a certain critical mass, but I'm not sure if it's as well utilized by people in other fields Anyway, best of luck!
  18. Um, it's hard to tell since you're in neuropsych. Have you looked at the results section for admissions in your field? If there are acceptances from schools you've applied to, and you haven't heard anything, chances are that it's an implied rejection.
  19. Placement, Placement, Placement. Pick choice A. But also, in terms of fit, I think sometimes it's better to figure out how to make a program work for you, than to immediately go somewhere that seems to have all the pieces of the puzzle in place. There's often a social reproduction problem in academia, where students working with the perfect supervisor/committee end up doing very similar, and in the end, less creative work. If you have to put together a committee from various subfields/related areas you'll find that you end up writing more dynamic, relevant, and self-aware scholarship. I guess to add to this with a more concrete example—I know of someone who works in the area of contemporary poetics, but with a romanticist as their supervisor. This person is doing some of the coolest, most radically interesting, and most innovative work in the field (in my opinion). Now I don't want to say this is all because of their supervisor, but I think some of it is because that distance from their "field" gave them space to question some received dogmas/orthodoxies.
  20. Prose style is totally an area worthy of scholarship, but there are so many factors to consider beyond simply declaring that as your interest. LouisePlease brings up a lot points that I think are still relevant after your response. Realistically, you won't be able to study all prose, or some sort of trans-historical definition of style. Likewise you will have to narrow down your approach; how do you hope to understand style? Are you hoping to look at it through a historical lens, or through some sort of structuralism or narratology? Do you want look at contemporary prose? 18th century prose? Prose in fiction? Prose in pharmaceutical ads? There are so many details that you're omitting, and without them it's very hard to make any sort of useful recommendation. Across disciplines and fields you're going to run into very different definitions of "style," so I'm not even sure you have a relatively stable object of study until you've bracketed your own understanding of the term. That said, this course description from a Berkeley seminar with Kent Puckett might be helpful: http://english.berkeley.edu/courses/4293. Does that sound like a course you would want to take, or an approach you're intrigued by? If not, where would the work you hope to do differ?
  21. If it helps/comforts anyone, I'm in at Berkeley, Hopkins, and Brown but will (obviously) be declining two of them after campus visits. I imagine there should be some movement on the waitlists when that happens—and I'll try to figure it out asap.
  22. As far as I've been told by my mentors, etc, they're not mandatory at all, and being unable to attend won't have any impact on your status. Legally they can't reject you after sending the initial letter. That being said, they're a good way to get a feel for the general tenor of the program, your fit with faculty members, and the other admits. So no, you're not going to miss anything vital, but they can help with hard decisions.
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