Riotbeard

Wendy Kline, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave. I am also rereading Charles Rosenberg's The Cholera Years. Lefils: I am really interested in Identity issues and the idea of the body. I have done some work on sexual politics, but most of my stuff has to do with race.

Keely: He is my favorite Poet by far. His poems are so brutal. Also, my advice on writing longer works is to think of it section by section. You are writing 6 10 page papers that feed into each other, not one 60 page idea (at least most likely). That has always helped me with writing longer stuff.

I had an undergrad English prof who got her PhD at Claremont. She has had a very good career. Other than that i cannot say much.

I am just teaching Cultural history of American Medicine, along with the much less pleasent tasks of trying to go abd and apply for grants.

I personally find Melville to be understood. I didn't love Moby Dick (Ok, I didn't like it), but Bartelby is great, and Battle Pieces is some pretty darn good poetry. I think the same could be said for Hawthorne. Mediocre novelist (or at least not to my taste), but one of the best writers of short stories. Check out "The Birth Mark" and "The Minister's Black Veil." Two great super weird short stories that aren't long to make you mad about Hawthorne's prose. Sorry, the english major and student of cultural history in me loves interloping on the lit kids' boards.

To be fair, I didn't knock participation per se. I knocked fetishizing participation over substantive ideas. Its the idea democracy or participation are good without specifying what participation is for or having a strong ideological orientation and set of goals. In short, I am denigrating Occupy Wall St., not all participatory movements.

I hate J. D. Salinger. The protagonist in the Catcher in the Rye is amazingly annoying, and do we really need tragedies about self-involved, wealthy white kids? Slavoj Žižek is also quite annoying. I generally find annoying participatory democratic ideologies, who prize activity over substance and ideas. Don't get me wrong I am pro-democracy (generally speaking), but meeting up in a park and voting on stuff doesn't much matter if you aren't willing to organize around a specific ideology/platform, and turn that into an actual movement. I just find his fetishizing of the "protest event" obnoxious. A bit of a rant...

Have you read Stuck Rubber Baby. It's a semi auto-biographical graphic novel about a gay white kid growing up in Birmingham, Al. while becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement. It is pretty brilliant. I need to look in kake. It sounds very interesting! Also we have very similar taste in theory. I am a foucauldian through and through. I also really like Sedgwick.

The syllabus is locked, but I did look that book and it looks great (I added it to my amazon wishlist as a matter of fact). I am assigning a eugenics book, Martin Pernick's The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915. I am also assigning reverby's new(ish) tuskegee book.

I am teaching a self-designed low/middle-level seminar this semester, and as I make my syllabus, I am constantly wondering what my students will think about the assignments. I was wondering what other grad students were teaching and what choices they were making that they viewed as adventurous? The class I am teaching is Cultural History of American Medicine: from Cholera to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For most of the semester were are reading cultural history monographs (hardly adventurous given the course), but for the last two weeks we are working with primary sources from 1990-2002. In the last two weeks, my students read parts of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, Watching 12 Monkeys, X-Men, and an episode of Buffy. Early on they have to read some Foucault also... What else are people teaching? What are you assigning that you are excited about?

i am in the middle of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole (about high school kids with a weird venerial disease), which I am teaching this semester. I have also been watching movies to decide which to assign (I am teaching cultural history of American Medicine).

Louis Menand has written some interesting book about the development of academia and education with a good bit of focus in that era. Menand is very readible, and thought provoking. I think you may also find Hofstadter's The Age of Reform to be a nice, very traditional overview of intellectual/political currents of the first half of the twentieth century. Every historian should probably read Hofstadter once, since he is an incredible stylist.

I think in the context of most grad programs, a B+ is thought of as a warning you might not be up to snuff and is pretty terrible-ish. It can be overcome for sure, but it should be thought of as a warning sign. B+ is the lowest grade before F in my grad program.

Karl Marx (Kind of amazed I am the first person to put up Marx) Michel Foucault E. P. Thompson Eva Sedgwick

I would say the earliest you would to contact somebody would be about four months after you submit the paper, but you should really probably wait six months.

Hey OP, Here is my advice. Act normal. Do not bring this up, but some people may know about it, so I wouldn't say you should act like it never happened or never talk about if it is addressed. You are the victim here. Acting like it never happened could make it seem like you have something to hide. Also in my experience, most grad students aren't going to gossip to faculty even if they would to each other. Not the most wonderful point, but still potentially reassuring. Additionally man, my heart goes out to you. Rape politics aside, there is a culture around certain crimes were false accusations seem to be hard to shake in terms stigmatization. People seem to throw out innocent until proven guilty around rape. Even the most liberal people seem to drop their ACLU convictions when comes to these types of situations. We live in the remnents of a patriarchal society, and it is stupid to argue otherwise, but it does not justify the treatment you seem to be receiving. You can get through this, and unless things get a lot worse, I don't think you need to leave your program.

You might want to also look into going to the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) conference. Could be useful. I would ask a professor for a book/article list to catch up on reading, but really I don't think it will be that big of a deal. Even if you are behind at the beginning, a year of grad school tends to equalize the cohort.

I don't think anybody in my PhD program has maintained a 4.0, but I also don't know anyone who has gotten below an A- in an course. I think my GPA is like a ~3.9, but most people I know don't put their GPA on their C/Vs or anything. I think your undergrad GPA matters, but that is more from, does your GPA imply a low quality level of work/work ethic as an undergrad, which a 3.7 pretty much says the same thing as a 4.0, if your total application package shows you do good work, and have serious interests that match up with program.

Yeah, I feel like a bit of a dolt now (I didn't even think about the fact that those movies are british). I didn't love contagion (although I didn't hate it or anything), so I probably wouldn't assign that even though from a pure content perspective it definitely fits. I have the same problem with the fact that I don't enjoy Angels in America. It's just my own personal taste... I was also thinking about Cronenberg's Rabid or Twelve Monkeys, but both may be too stylistically off-putting as to distract students from interpreting it. Walking Dead episodes are another option. Movie suggestions would also be welcomed

I was aware of that (One of my best friends in my program was a guatamalanist [spelling?]), but I had not even thought to use them! That sounds very interesting as paired with the reverby book, although fitting with the general depressing theme... Thanks!

Doesn't matter. It all depends on the rest of your package. Your GPA shouldn't be a red flag which 3.7 isn't, so I wouldn't worry. Obviously try to do well, but not in the name of turning a 3.7 into a 3.8.

These are great suggestions. I forgot about the Yellow Wallpaper. I was an English major in college... The reason why I am only asking for short stories (although short form literary nonfiction is also welcome) is all the long works I am assigning are history monographs, so I don't have space for full novels. If this helps here are the monographs I am assigning: Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and embodied Social identity in Nineteenth-Century America Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: african-american illness and suffering during the civil war and reconstruction Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health Warwick Anderson, Colonial pathologies : American tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the Philippines Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 Susan Reverby- Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy March Shell- Polio and its aftermath : the paralysis of culture

Anybody have any good suggestion for short stories that could be assigned in a cultural history of american medicine class? Disease, doctors or nurses could be central themes. I plan on assigning Poe's mask of the red death, Hawthorne's the birthmark, and Alcott's my contraband. I also plan on assigning the episode "The Body" from Buffy at the end of the course and/or 28 days later or children of men. Any other thoughts would be great.

Tulane does not have written comps (it's a portfolio system). From what I understand neither does Duke, as we modeled the revisions to our program after Duke.

Ditto on Chinese now, portuguese later (if ever). I think Asian history is definitely the way to go as your primary interest, but if you are interested in imperial history as well, you should look at departments that at least have an Euro-Imperial historian of some stripe for your committee. I have friend who works on British Imperial East Africa, and I think he would tell you his work is vastly improved by having both British and Africanist historians on his diss committee. The approaches in these two historiographies are vastly different, so being able to work with both would probably allow you to get better sense of how both sides look at Imperialism in Asia. Also start gearing your coursework in college towards this stuff, so you have a strong writing sample, general knowledge of the historiography, and things to talk about in your S.O.P. Knowing prominant works in the field will also help you figure out where to apply. That's my two cents.