onerepublic96

Hi all! I've been pretty MIA on this site for a while after last year's cycle ended, but I just wanted to pop in and wish you all good luck. I can't even begin to imagine how stressful this process must have been this year, and each one of you smart, strong candidates deserves to make it into your first-choice programs. 🙌

There are many, many reasons why doing two (incredibly strenuous) degrees at the same time is an awful idea, and potential visa issues aren't even among the foremost concerns.

Hi there! I like to think of myself as a modernist but I also am specifically interested in Southern lit (though my subject interests are a bit different from yours). Honestly, I'd disagree that Southern lit is a dying field. When I was applying in the last cycle, I found that the programs at Boston U, Harvard, UMich, and UPenn were my favourites. While it's true that you won't necessarily find tons of scholars branding themselves 'Southern lit specialists' and working in large numbers at any one department, there's a fair number of them in quite a few departments (even at large universi

Everything @Glasperlenspieler said. Also, just throwing this out there, but you might not necessarily need to find a prof who works specifically in the YA lit branch of queer studies/theory/lit. Finding a queer studies prof who tackles some questions similar to yours, uses methodology that is interesting to you, etc. might just be enough. I'd regroup, look at programs that lean strongly into into queer studies or departments that have lots of people working in the area, go through each prof's research statement, see what they've been writing about and what courses they've been teaching, and de

I agree with @Glasperlenspieler. The WS is the most important part, and when I was applying, I was generally advised that recommendation letters + the statement of purpose are the second most important aspects. CV + transcripts + GRE scores are tertiary (in very rough terms).

Honestly, the best round to apply was last year's round. And I mean that in the sense that with the current covid/economic/political situation, the next few years are going to be completely unpredictable and range from "weird" to "total shitstorm", but we don't know which will be which. So at this point, the best decision you can make is going to depend entirely on your own financial and mental resources, and not at all on any kind of strategy or statistical game. Do you personally feel like you need to try to get in with the soonest possible cycle? Do you have the resources to deal with it (f

Some programs will allow two samples totalling 15-25 pages, but even those usually note that they would prefer one paper of that length (or even a 15-25 page excerpt of an even longer piece).

"Freestanding M.A. applications are not affected." Well, but of course.

As the above posters have said, philosophy can be/often is a major component as you work on literary studies, but it is almost always a tool rather than an object of study in itself. Otherwise, you would be in the Philosophy Department.

If I had started by MA one year later I would be finishing up my dissertation right now and I cannot even imagine how that would have gone... my god. And the fact that there is no end or respite in sight to ANY part of this COVID/economy tanking/universities in major flux/job market dying off before our eyes is so incredibly taxing...

Ah that’s reasonable. Thanks!

Last year it was right about October for me.

Hi all. Just wondering how much editing is permissible between a paper as given at conference and subsequent publication in a post-conference volume (NOT talking about proper journal publication here)? I’ve got a conference paper that’s a bit more conversational and informally structured, which makes for good talking but not so much reading, and since I’ve never had to deal with this kind of “publication” before, I’m just wondering how much editing it would be acceptable for me to do for this second part of the affair. Whether any extra referencing/argumentation would be permissible.

I second the fact that it might help you, given your background, to stress interdisciplinarity in your applications. It's awesome you love American modernism (that's my field, too!) but you don't necessarily need to be fully immersed in all the intricacies of the field at this stage. The experience you've likely gained from your women's studies, philosophy, and creative writing classes have probably also fed into your interest in modernism. It's a good idea to think about what attracts you in that field, what would you like to learn more about, and then try to address how your studies in these

I took the subject test a couple of times and in my experience, I always got scores back strictly at the 4 or 5 week (I think?) mark that they indicate as their wait time for results. Though you do have to remember that if you wait to see your result before sending the score report to your schools, you have to add an additional 5 days for processing.