Crow T. Robot

U Minnesota Critical Studies in Discourse and Society (CSDS) would be a great program to add to your list! It is housed in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, has Critical Theory at the core of its curriculum, has a heavy media studies component, and is affiliated with a few faculty who are doing very interesting work in critical geography. It sounds like the perfect mix for what you've shared of your interests. Just a note on History of Consciousness--they're at UC Santa Cruz, not Stanford. The Stanford program in the universe you're talking about is Modern Thought and Literature--I'm headed there in a few weeks! Both are fantastic interdisciplinary programs, and obviously I am biased toward Stanford, but your blurb really resonated with a lot of things I picked up on when I visited UMN for Comp Lit (housed in the same department as CSDS, and with the same requirements as it--just different affiliated faculty). Please feel free to message me if you have any questions on any of these programs or apps to interdisciplinary programs in general!

Welcome, SydCaesar! You've come to exactly the right place! Some questions for you: what angle are you approaching cultural studies from? What about the universe of cultural studies is most important to your work? Is it an emphasis on or openness to critical theory/Continental philosophy? Working with texts across media? Or more generally taking a culture, rather than a literary topic, as your main object of study, as with American Studies, Black Studies, Chicanx Studies, etc., programs? It seems to me that "cultural studies" means many things to many people, so I want to make sure I understand what articulation of it you're engaging with. I don't know much about the programs you've listed, other than Harvard English's massive strength in your field due to Gates and others. From what you've described of your research interests, it sounds like American Studies programs, "more theoretical" English programs, and maybe a few Cultural Studies programs would all be good flavors of program to look at. (Are the programs you listed all English programs, btw?) But if it's especially important to you to have a disciplinarily flexible, theory-heavy program and/or one that emphasizes questions of 'media,' I'd also recommend checking out: UMinnesota CSDS--a Cultural Studies PhD housed in a hybrid comp lit/media studies department. Has real emphases on media and critical theory, and the affiliated faculty have eclectic and fascinating specialties, including things like critical geography. They seem to have a healthy postcolonialist bent--not sure how strong they are on African American lit or slave narratives though. Duke Literature--extremely theory-heavy, and many people seem to be doing postcolonial type work there. You might look at Duke English too, which may be a better fit if the literature is more important to you than the theory. On the American Studies/Black Studies side, it looks like UT Austin has solid programs in both--and of course their English program is excellent, and I'm sure there's a lot of potential for intellectual cross-pollination across the three departments.

@bobochicken for sure, Chicago is obviously a kickass institution with many incredible faculty in your area. I think the question would be how closely you'd actually get to work with them as an MAPH student, and whether that degree of proximity + the opportunity to hone your research agenda are worth the cost. If there are people in your network who did the MAPH or knew people who did it, I'd reach out to get their impressions on that especially. Reading about the MAPH and recent award-winning theses from it, I am suspicious of the advisor/"preceptor" split on thesis panels... the fact that all the comments/endorsements on the award-winning theses are from the advanced-PhD-level "preceptors" rather than the actual faculty advisors raises a big red flag for me about the faculty's involvement in your work in that program. But again, this is all speculation from the outside, though somewhat fueled by what I've heard from others. I did my MA in English last year and am working full time this year. For me, I don't think I would have been accepted to CSDS (I applied CSDS and was accepted to Comp Lit this season) or other PhD programs like it right out of undergrad. Out of UG, I had a vague, unconnected mess of research interests that I really needed the extra year (I did a 4+1 program at my undergrad school) to spin together into a coherent project. I was able to forge some great--hopefully lifelong--relationships with faculty and colleagues in my 4+1 program, but I'm not sure how similar my program is to the MAPH. My program was concentrated in one department and was tiny--both in terms of my cohort and the number of faculty in the department. I think that departmental coziness and the huge amount of faculty interaction that allowed was probably the most important part of my MA program--it was in an independent study with one professor and a series of drop-in conversations with another (stemming from a class of hers I'd taken) that I really started working out all the ideas that I think I'll be working through in my PhD program. On the other hand, you've already gotten a CSDS acceptance, so your research interests are already coherent, exciting, and (to use the word from the CSCL acceptance letter) engaged. To me the value of an MA is getting your interests up to that level, and you're already there. The whole CSCL department, especially the CSDS track, struck me as essentially a media studies department with strengths in theory and literature--I actually think they are the center of all things film studies at UMN if I'm not mistaken. Almost all the grad students I talked with there were doing media-centric projects--some music, many film, etc. Obviously I am laying it on thick for CSDS and have much more experience with that program than the MAPH--I'd be really curious to hear from someone on the boards who did the MAPH.

Oh, and congrats on the acceptance, @bobochicken!!!!

Hey @bobochicken, the CSCL people gave me a spreadsheet of recent placements for both CSDS and Comp Lit grads when I visited. It was very impressive. Ivy postdocs and R1 tenure track positions were in there. I don't know if I still have it but I'll see if I can dig it up. I would very strongly advise against doing the Chicago MAPH. From what I can tell, it doesn't really give you much of a placement advantage for future PhD apps. You're also rushed through the program in a year and from my understanding (admittedly hearsay, but this reputation is out there) this makes it harder to forge the meaningful faculty relationships you'd want to have with an eye toward getting recommenders for a future round of PhD apps. And you're paying for an MA on top of that, and in an expensive city, none of which is ideal. CSDS is a top program with excellent faculty and grad stfdents and, if you're cool with living in the Midwest, I think it would be an incredible experience. The only reason I'd consider doing the MAPH over CSDS is if you absolutely had your heart set on another interdisciplinary PhD program and wanted to use the year to strengthen your app, though even then I don't know how much value the MAPH would have.

Belated massive thanks to @Warelin for the kind words, and huge huge huge congrats to @Warelin, @M(allthevowels)H, @Melvillage_Idiot, @bumbleblu, @melian517, @heysickah, and anyone else I missed!!!

The two that immediately come to mind are Duke Literature and Minnesota Comp Lit (or CSDS; there's really no difference between CSDS and Comp Lit at Minnesota). Both excellent programs with top faculty and explicit theory focuses. Minnesota Comp Lit is a seriously exciting program; I loved almost everything about it when I visited this year.

Officially committed to Stanford Modern Thought and Literature!!! See you around campus, @FreakyFoucault!

Not sure if this will help anyone here, but I just declined my spot at UCSC History of Consciousness. Hoping this helps someone somewhere!

B-B-B-B-Berkeley Rhetoric rejection (air horns). And with that, all the decisions are in.

I didn't go to UVM, but I got a chance to spend some time with McGowan when my MA advisor brought him to our campus to give a talk, and he's absolutely brilliant. My only interaction with Neroni was a quick Q+A exchange at a conference--I've been meaning to read her work because her talk was incredible. UVM in general also sounds like a great place--I hear nothing but good things about Burlington!

Congrats! Do you have any interest in Continental philosophy or psychoanalysis? Or just cultural theory in general? Todd McGowan and Hilary Neroni at UVM are some of the absolute best in the game, and such wonderful people.

So... how have everyone's experiences exchanging phone calls/emails with programs been? I'm trying not to read into them too much, but the faculty and students in one of my programs, who all seem absolutely lovely, have been not the most responsive in communicating... i.e., scheduling calls with multiple profs (after they reached out to me) and them not calling, profs and students not emailing me back (after they initiated contact), etc. I'm really, really trying to not feel entitled to anyone's time--I know how busy everyone is, and it's incredibly generous that people are even taking the time to talk with me in the first place--but nothing like this has happened with any of the other programs I've been in contact with. My basic fear, I guess, is that I really do not want to end up in a program where people are too busy to work with me and I have to move heaven and earth to get on anyone's calendar. I don't really know if this kind of contact pattern is enough to extrapolate from, and I recognize that my MA experience in a very small department where students got more access to profs may be coloring my perception, but I can't help but be a little concerned. Thoughts??

@punctilious and @M(allthevowels)H, thanks for the kind words! I'm beyond thrilled to have the options I do have (I love that "someone else's greener pastures" saying!) and definitely feel extraordinarily fortunate. I kind of feel like PhD programs present an inversion of the old Groucho Marx line--when it comes down to it, you don't want to be part of any club that wouldn't have you as a member!

Just got an email from the Duke Literature DGS... "unlikely" that they will admit me off their waitlist. Sort of bummed because it was my dream program going into this whole process, but after talking with faculty at places I got in at, I think my former "there's Duke and then there's everywhere else" mentality was completely unwarranted. I think I'll end up being happier--and getting an education that better fits my own individual needs--somewhere else.

I'm planning on attacking: Capitalism and Desire by Todd McGowan (one of the most lucid explicators and imaginative appliers of Lacanian theory out there) Some Bataille--thinking about The Accursed Share and Literature and Evil A charitable hate read of The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant Our Aesthetic Categories by Sianne Ngai Something on the Russian Revolution--maybe Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy? And, because I hate myself, Capital (Volume 1) and as much of Écrits as I can get through... Re. catching up on theory reading, I'd definitely second @LexHex's suggestion on the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. I have a syllabus from an excellent theory class I took that used that book for all its readings if anyone is interested!

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.

I too applied to both "traditional" and "interdisciplinary" programs (including some @CulturalCriminal mentioned above)! I have to head out right now but am leaving this note here as a placeholder to remind myself to get back to you!

@punctilious ahhhhh that's incredible, huge huge huge congrats to you both!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Massive, massive congrats to you @renea--so amazing to have landed the elusive double acceptance--and @katie64--adding to the chorus of well wishes on funding!!!!

Hey @Hermenewtics, I'm just going to throw my last thoughts on here because I think this discussion is still pretty germane to the thread. If all you want me to agree to is that 'obscurantism' (and calling whole branches of thought categorically 'obscurantist' is quite a meaty and suspect premise, with or without Nussbaum's support) leads to divergent interpretations, sure, I'm with ya. I just don't know what that does for us. Maybe in the context of, like, analytic philosophy divergent interpretations are problematic and indicative of ineffective work, but I'm really not convinced that producing work that leads to divergent interpretations is a "sin" in and of itself.

Yup, I gotcha, I was just poking at the distinction (theory/jargony vs. textualist/technical) you draw in support of that main point, especially because to me, the fact that this distinction doesn't quite work has interesting implications for your main point. If you grant that there is not necessarily so substantive of a difference between the jargony and the technical (as in, if you grant that we could approach 'theory' and all its jargony terms as a technical toolkit that helps us read texts), the main problem becomes less around getting institutions to stop using jargon as a gatekeeping measure and more around empowering emerging scholars with the tools they might want or need to do good work. I'm not sure, though, about the "grounded"/"abstract" distinction. For my money, each example you give draws on and is part of a different discursive formation; none is inherently more "grounded" in a given text than the other. I'm also not convinced that acrimonious debate/diverging interpretations around a body of a work should cause us to regard that body of work with suspicion or, implicitly, accuse its writers of obscurantism. The kind of contention you put your finger on is certainly not unique to the universe of Big French Theory or other fields people may find jargon-heavy. In terms of readability, oh yeah, I hear you. Lacan is my ride or die, but reading him is a massive headache. Totally different experience from reading Brooks or hooks or even Foucault or a whole host of other important thinkers who just come right out and say what they mean. What I'd say is that I think it's valuable for literature students to have different kinds of reading experiences--to read writers who situate you in different relations to the text. For Lacan, a lot of his texts (mostly originally delivered orally) seem at times like the speech of an analysand, a patient whose couch-babble you must decipher, and within which you have to determine the unspoken stuff that everything else circulates around. Being put in that position stimulates a different kind of thinking from the thinking you find yourself doing while reading Brown, Ngai, Morton, etc. (idk, just freestyling contemporary lit critics here). I guess that's my ultimate point.

Just out of curiosity, what makes 'poststructuralism' circle jerk-y and narratology and poetics technical for you? I think we can all agree that there's some 'poststructuralist' criticism that's just epically solipsistic and bad, but I think at their best, schools of thought influenced by Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, etc., come up with concepts and associated terms that do real critical and analytical work, just as the terms from the fields you flag as "technical" do.

@Melvillage_Idiot I'll suggest another explanation for the research projects you're finding dissatisfyingly jargony: people just thematize their research in different ways. I think of literary studies work as going in one of two directions: You examine a specific archive (e.g. early modern poetry), its social and historical contexts, and a cluster of issues that arise in that archive and those contexts. Or, You trace a cluster of ideas across several archives, making connections and noting differences across different contexts. The second kind of work tends by nature to be more 'theoretical' because the theoretical framework is driving the inquiry, as opposed to the period/archive doing the driving. This kind of work, or at least the work I've read that I'd bucket in this category, tends to need to spend much more time defining key terms, teasing out resonances with existing philosophical conversations (which already have their own key terms proliferating...), and negotiating competing theories--all of which can leave you with a ton of specialized terminology to juggle. (If you can't tell, this is the kind of work I want to do; theory is totally my favorite thing about literary studies...) If I'm reading your posts right, it sounds like the first kind of work resonates much more with you than the second kind. That's rad; I'd just wonder if scholars who are being 'jargony' may be trying for a different way of thematizing their research than what you/others may want to do, as opposed to just doing a failed/obscurantist version of the same kind of research you have in mind, if that makes sense.

@Wabbajack @WildeThing @marisawhy @all other Berkeley Rhetoric applicants: I just called the department and the grad coordinator told me they haven't sent out all acceptances yet! He said they hope to have the rest out "within the next week or two." Keep the hope alive!

I'll throw my vote in for not a necessary step. I'm very happy with how I've done this season, and I only contacted one POI, who turned out to be very busy at the time and referred me to another faculty member. After I was accepted at that school, I got the chance to have a great discussion with that same POI. Maybe it was an unfair extrapolation from one experience, but I kind of inferred from my pre-acceptance exchange that faculty aren't always the most thrilled about being contacted by prospective applicants. Their time is already divided among so many projects and students (both current and past!), and since admittedly one of my chief anxieties is 'imposing on people' or 'taking up their time,' it was convenient for me to take this as a universal principle and not reach out to any more POIs... I kind of think that as long as you have a strong sense of your POIs' research interests and are able to link those interests convincingly to your own project in the SOP, you've accomplished the main thing that emails to faculty try to accomplish: your interest in and fit with the work going on in the department. Just my experience; YMMV!