psstein

I have to confess that I've never read anything or even heard about anyone who focuses on Korea. Most historians of science with a non-Western focus look at either the Middle East, Russia, or China. You should probably try to find someone who works in East Asia more generally, like Victor Seow at Harvard or Projit Bihari Mukhaji at Penn.

I'd be more than "a bit concerned." In the US, 65% of tenured/TT faculty come from 10 institutions, and something like 90% come from 20. https://www.umass.edu/history/phd-recipients-2000 The above is a list of placements for one of the programs you've mentioned. Take a look at it. Some of them are very good, others fair, and several outright terrible. I know this is an unpopular thought, but history PhDs (and humanities PhDs, more generally) aren't tremendously useful outside of academia. That's not to say that non-academic jobs are a sign of failure, quite the opposite. It is, however, a reality that you can get the majority of those jobs without holding a PhD.

As I say all the time, I'd recommend looking at these programs' placement records and outcomes. Bluntly, I don't see any of these programs setting you up for future success. Remember, getting in somewhere isn't the goal. The goal is to get a job after you complete the PhD; most people who pursue the PhD track will want an academic job and probably not get it. I would also tell you that Univ. of New England doesn't have a PhD program.

They usually go out in late December.

MA grades are usually (not always) taken into a bit more account than undergraduate grades. I had a 3.44 (3.8 in history) and still got into an excellent program. I wouldn't worry too much. Upward trends are a good thing. When I interviewed somewhere, my PoI told me "your grades really went up after you got out of science courses." As I've said elsewhere in this thread, grades are probably the least important element of the application. They do matter, but you should focus disproportionately on things you can control, like the quality of your SoP and writing sample.

What are your interests?

No, I applied in Fall 2016.

What are your interests?

In case s/he reads this, congratulations to the Minnesota HSTM accepted! They notify you very early; I got mine in December 3 years ago.

I'll say that it's certainly not a great sign, seeing as how anything but "A" and the occasional "A-" is usually a bit of cause for concern. That said, GPA is probably the least important element of these applications. So long as you're over the minimal threshold, you're probably fine. Focus on the things you can control: writing sample and SoP. More of a concern to me, for your future PhD ambitions, is how easily you seem to flit about interests. @Sigaba and @telkanuru have already mentioned it, but a lot of the work of the PhD is taking a fairly narrow topic, making it a smaller, more manageable project, then further developing the tools you already have to complete that project. To use a history of medicine example, a student could come in interested in the history of 19th and 20th century bacteriology in the United States. From there, s/he'd narrow down further, to, say, how American physicians and military officers used bacteriology in the colonial Philippines to create racial hierarchies (which Warwick Anderson did in his Colonial Pathologies). Having broad interests isn't a bad thing (especially when it allows you to attack problems in new ways), but it is a bad thing when you can't commit to one area and study it intensely. Your interests should broaden and change in a specified area, as per my above example. Yet, many faculty make their careers working on very narrow topics. It's a rare scholar who's able to do high-quality work across historical periods and countries. Being a generalist is fine when you're interested in teaching, as you've several times said you are. As I've advised you before, I believe it's worth your while (given your skepticism about your "fit" in academia and your justified concerns about the future of the field of history) to see what you need to do to teach secondary school in a state of your choosing.

I don't know about other programs, but Hopkins HoS interviews 5 or so candidates for its slots, and then accepts somewhere between 1 and 3.

No, you are not a failure for leaving academia or questioning your future in academia. The "non-academic = failure" thought process and belief system needs to be burned to the ground and the earth underneath salted. In today's academic job market, many people with excellent pedigrees and award-winning books have trouble finding non-contingent academic employment. Many of them leave academia. They are not failures. I did the exact same thing in full knowledge that a) I didn't want to spend more time in my program, b) the "alt-ac" thing is a total fucking farce, and c) I had grown to hate my particular field, plus the one I had the most interest in is practically dead. I don't consider myself a failure. I think leaving my program after the MA was one of the best things I've ever done. If you really love teaching, perhaps you should see what your state's (e.g. PA) educational license requirements look like.

Even then, pedigree matters a lot. You can be the best student in a generation at University of the Western Ozarks or Hollywood Upstairs University, but you're still going to have an incredibly uphill battle. The market is so godawful that Ivy PhDs are lucky to get jobs at R3s and PUIs in undesirable parts of the country.

Certainly anything with "competitively based" funding, or that is unwilling to commit up front to a 5+ year package with tuition remission and stipend included. You're likely going to take more than 5 years to finish the PhD, so a clear sense of "what do I have to do for funding after year 5?" is necessary. I see you're interested in Madison, btw. Send me a PM if you like, I'm glad to discuss.

I promise that, despite our gruff and straightforward approach to advice giving, @Sigaba, @telkanuru, and I don't bite! Can't say the same for anyone else though! ?

It is probably in your best interest to be around 1000 words, though slightly over is okay. It's really designed to prevent them from having to read 10 page SoPs with multiple footnotes, long historiographical discourses, etc.

Certainly, what I mean is that the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, probably one of the most dominant ones since the 60s, is in full retreat. Many scholars (wrongly IMO, but still) view Cambridge-style Intellectual History as predominantly Eurocentric. What do I think is more active? That's not an easy question to answer. I'd say that there's a stronger lean towards transnational approaches to intellectual history (see the journal Global Intellectual History), as well as an interest in applying Cambridge methods to non-European contexts. J.G.A. Pocock, who's still alive, has written recently about translating the Cambridge School to other contexts.

"Medical humanities" was one of the ways history of medicine tried to interact with other fields, but I agree, the job postings are much rarer now than even a few years ago. One of the problems with "medical humanities," from my view, was that a lot of the work was frequently anthropology with medicine grafted on, or history of medicine with sociology pasted on. History of science is in the midst of an environmental turn, but I don't see that continuing forever. I completely agree that one shouldn't try to do "trendy things" for dissertations, because trends move quickly. That said, there are other fields I wouldn't recommend students going into. For example, US Diplomatic History or Naval History are very dead fields. The same is true with most traditional approaches to intellectual history.

Just from the history side, a few years ago, African history (and non-European/American more generally) was very trendy. African history went through a significant hiring boom, and now the market is just about as bad as everything else. History of science, also, has had some growth in the last few years, but the market has very rapidly cooled.

I really, really disagree with this. Just speaking with my own emeriti who got their jobs in the 80s, it wasn't that easy. Two very well-known historians of science (both Harvard PhDs from the 80s) told me how they had a sheaf of rejection letters. The job market you're describing existed in the 1950s-1970s, where higher ed expanded to meet both a growing population and the needs of national defense. It hasn't really existed since the early 80s. As for "have to be really excellent," I'm sorry, but that's also just not the case. There are many highly capable people with good publishing records/conference presentations/award winning books/etc. who have a lot of trouble finding full-time academic employment. Even speaking to younger faculty can show some real horror stories. When I was still in Wisconsin, I was at an acceptance weekend event and speaking with a prospective student. She told me "I could go to X or Y Univ., and just outwork everyone into a job." I had to hold my tongue and tell her "it doesn't fucking work like that." It doesn't. Telling a student "if you're a superstar at Univ. of the Western Ozarks, of course you'll get a job!" is nothing short of negligence.

Save yourself the money and time and don't bother with Boston College or Univ. of Washington. I can't speak directly for Washington, but Boston College's outcomes are not good, especially, if like most people, you have a goal of becoming a TT faculty member. Have you considered Duke or Chicago? I recall them having strong faculty in British history, but they may be early modern focused... it's been awhile since I've looked at their faculty. Also check out Hopkins. About your lack of thesis experience: do you have an appropriate length writing sample that showcases your knowledge of historiography and is driven by primary source research in English and French? I do have to say that I find a lot of what you're describing very interesting. History of material culture in London alone is a decades-long project. It's great to have a lot of interests-- that said, you'd benefit from some focus. What, specifically, do you want to investigate about cultural history of 1960s London? If you haven't already, I'd strongly recommend reading Roy Porter's history of London. Porter was a bizarre character, as people who knew him told me, but he was a masterful writer and social historian.

I've made this offer two years running now, and although I'm now officially "on leave," if you're interested in Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, please feel free to send me a PM.

I think placement is a fair (though obviously not perfect) evaluation tool for training quality, resources, and program reputation. Likewise, I see attrition rate as an indicator of departmental culture and support.

You know the full story, but this is a significant portion of why I left the PhD. I couldn't justify spending years (with a questionably supportive department) to obtain a degree, that, in all honesty, doesn't have a huge amount of application outside the academy. The "alt-ac" job push is a topic for another time, but I am not positive towards it. I think it's a ready made excuse to ignore structural problems of PhD training. I don't consider "rankings" the same as placement. Placement is, IMO, one of the few metrics that actually matters, if you want a TT career afterwards. I would submit that there are departments ranked in the top 20 on US News and World Report that are not in the top 30 in terms of placement. Moreover, if all 6 of your cohort found TT jobs, your placement ranks you much higher than the mid-40s, just IMO, of course.

The GRE fits in the same category. Much like, for example, LoRs, GRE scores cannot make an application in and of themselves, but they can definitely break it. An adcom will likely throw an application with a 149 verbal GRE in the trash.