a_sort_of_fractious_angel

Accepted at WUSTL.

Assuming husband has been rejected from Colorado's PhD, as he was just accepted to their MA without funding. NO.

Congrats!

Accepted into Duquesne and Maryland's MA programs. I would have to apply to funding externally for Maryland's MA, though, and for Duquesne I am on the wait list for a teaching fellowship. Both pieces of good news, but ultimately UVM and WVU's offers are a bit more appealing because both are offering me GTAs and tuition remissions. Still happy with the news, though!   

I entered my MA prepared to study Faulkner and Joyce. 
I left with a project on contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean-American authors. 
There's flexibility within the PhD and even more so in the MA - you'll likely have to take 3-4 required courses that cover time period (only based off of my experience), so really the world is your oyster. 
As the above posters have advised, find your scholars of interest that first semester. Get involved with their research if you can. Get familiar with them. 

That's awesome to hear! They sound fantastic! I hope you get to chat with them

Also got a Dean's Fellowship from Buffalo - extra 1k for 4 years. I'm guessing others may have the same good news from Buffalo in their emails inboxes. 
 

Also got a Dean's Fellowship from Buffalo - extra 1k for 4 years. I'm guessing others may have the same good news from Buffalo in their emails inboxes. 
 

Also got a Dean's Fellowship from Buffalo - extra 1k for 4 years. I'm guessing others may have the same good news from Buffalo in their emails inboxes. 
 

Accepted at Syracuse, wait listed for funding.

Happy venting!
Our CFO has given the go ahead for me to work remotely! That means I get to keep my job! I'M SO HAPPY!

Congratulations @a_sort_of_fractious_angel and @katie64!!!!

Accepted at Syracuse, wait listed for funding.

Also got a Dean's Fellowship from Buffalo - extra 1k for 4 years. I'm guessing others may have the same good news from Buffalo in their emails inboxes. 
 

I received two lovely emails from the Louisville grad assistant and director of the graduate English program stating that they would love for me to attend (I have been waitlisted for funded so emailed back last week saying I really admire the program but can't attend without funding) and will keep me updated immediately of changes on the funding waitlist, so I feel pretty encouraged. Program director even asked if I'd like to set up a time to talk on the phone more about the program and so he can answer any questions I may have. No matter what happens, the graduate faculty at Louisville has been so extremely kind this entire process and I'm very impressed by that. 

Accepted at Syracuse, wait listed for funding.

Accepted at Syracuse, wait listed for funding.

Accepted at Syracuse, wait listed for funding.

Thank you so much! Just put it in my amazon cart haha.

I think my husband has a few things he wants to read:
We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour Getting back up to speed on Russian, using The New Penguin Russian Course and the Russian texts we own (novels, short stories, a book on Putin, etc.) I saw suggestions for a couple theory overview texts that he may pick up: The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction Perhaps not this summer, but he'll probably pick up French for Reading (as previously recommended by @a_sort_of_fractious_angel, I believe) to work on his second language requirement I think Harvard sends out its reading list for the General Exam sometime over the summer, so he'll probably get started on that, too! Excited to hear what other people are thinking!

Hey! I (obviously) haven't been in that position and I don't recall knowing anyone who has. But, if I were you, I'd think that (on one hand) they're obviously excited to have you and they host the recruitment event with the hope that you will accept, you know? And if you do say yes prior to going, the visit will still serve a purpose for you in terms of meeting people, getting the low-down on the living situation, etc. 
However, I totally get why it feels a bit weird. When is the visit? Is it possible to just hold off until you go and then maybe tell them in person (if you'd like to do that) at the conclusion of the visit? And then fill out the forms/paperwork? It'll give you (in theory) the opportunity to make sure that it's a cool spot/people don't mysteriously disappear into broom closets/you don't have an evil, 3-headed doppleganger in the 'burgh. And will bypass the maybe weirdness of saying yes prior to showing up?
Apologies that this really isn't a definitive answer but I am super jazzed for you.

That sounds so exciting! I hope it works out for you guys  

Another thing to consider when thinking about "traditional" vs. "nontraditional" English PhD programs is the opportunities available for students to engage in work outside their department. When I say this, I'm specifically thinking about the way that IU-Bloomington's program is set up. I've always considered English literature to sort of be my "home base" so to speak in terms of academic work, but my work within the field of English lit has always been more concerned with interdisciplinary research from drawing in feminist theory, queer theory, biopolitics, etc. etc., rather than a specific region or time period of literature. I received an acceptance to Bloomington's English PhD program, and they were telling me that they have a required PhD minor, which means in addition to completing the PhD requirements for English lit (I do mostly 19th c American), I need to declare a sub-field through the minor option, which extends to everything from American studies to critical theory to gender studies. I guess my point here is that whether a department is "traditional" or not doesn't necessarily need to stop you if think you've found a good fit! I particularly have a lot of friends from my MA program who do English and Philosophy, and many of them have ended up going the English PhD track due to the opportunities for PhD minors, graduate certificates, etc. So to echo others on this thread as well, I do think that many English departments moving towards a more interdisciplinary/nontraditional mode anyway, and my advice would be to consider all those extra factors as well, like opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Bloomington's PhD minor was definitely one of the major draws for me.

Ok, so I wrote something similar to this in the "What makes research compelling?" thread, and this may be coming at it from a different angle than what you were asking about, but I think there are a few questions it might be useful to ask yourself when deciding between an English program and an interdisciplinary humanities program:
What's driving your inquiry? What kinds of questions do you find yourself interested in? If you find yourself drawn to questions about a particular literary form (the problem of character in the 19th-century novel, to take @Mise's fascinating example from another thread), period/region/culture (folklore and in/nonhumanism in Caribbean lit), or author/loosely associated group of authors (Henry James's engagement with discourses of tourism), an English program is probably the best place to shoot for. On the other hand, if you find yourself interested more in a concept or cluster of concepts and how they play across contexts and archives (waste and notions of wasting across literature, philosophy, and pop culture), or how different schools of thought influenced one another (the hidden Frankfurt School roots of object-oriented ontology), or, probably most clearly, intersections between literary study and other fields (a genealogy of the figure of the witness in modern thought, both legal and literary/philosophical), then an explicitly interdisciplinary program like Stanford MTL/Berkeley Rhetoric/Duke Literature/UMN CSDS/UCSC Hiscon might be for you. As @CulturalCriminal asked, what is your interest in (or tolerance of) 'theory'? Interdisciplinary programs tend to be much more theory-heavy--Stanford MTL, for example, has 3 core courses, all of which are basically theory courses. In these programs, as far as I can tell, your grounding in theory is supposed to enable you to formulate questions that stretch across media and historical/cultural contexts but still have clear unifying conceptual threads running through them. I do think your professor's point that not many English programs are "traditional" anymore should be taken seriously, though. My interests are definitely more theoretical/interdisciplinary, but I ended up applying to some English programs that seemed to welcome this kind of work.
As far as placements go, the top interdisciplinary programs are up there with the top English programs. Check out Stanford MTL's and especially Berkeley Rhetoric's placements and you'll see many grads landing tenure-track jobs at Ivy League/other highly ranked schools.

Husband has now been informed that he is 'first in line' on the UMD waitlist for his field, but that they're also offering him a spot in the MA program with a 1/2 TAship. Nice try, Maryland, but we're good.
Hopefully this means that the MA spot with funding can go to someone else!!