Imenol

Where is Trivellato going?

So much anxiety for Harvard! What's your field / POI?

To be honest, I find that Harvard admission quite suspicious... It does not seem that anyone else got any news

Some Harvard acceptances seem to have been sent already! Does anyone know anything?

Oh I went to Brown too! What was your concentration? I remember shopping that course but it was a semester with many enticing choices... Hope all goes well with your app!

It is true that you need Latin to be a medievalist. However, I do know people who get into good programs with a basic/intermediate level and study extensively the first years. I am currently at the University of Cambridge and I know a fair share of people who did their master's in Medieval History without any prior Latin. Once in the Master, everyone takes a Latin course and by the end of the year people already start with their PhDs (bear in mind that PhDs in the UK are shorter, so this would be an equivalent to learning all your Latin in the second year of your American PhD). In the end, I think programs can be flexible about your initial level, even if you are of course expected to be proficient by the time of your exams.

I have heard good things about the Paideia program in Rome, and they do have financial aid

Just out of curiosity: is your POI Tom Cummins?

I applied to Columbia as well but have not heard anything from them yet! I imagine you want to work with Russo, so your lack of training in literature is probably not an issue

First place that comes to mind is Columbia! Emily Rutherford is there. Also, George Chauncey, who does US history but might be the top scholar of the LGBT community in the contemporary period.

One of the problems with your argument is that you provide evidence from the 80s to denounce the field of development economics now. I do not know enough about the history of US aid to question your point regarding the different nature of US and USSR investments during the Cold War, or their varying degrees of effectiveness. But I can tell you that it is simply wrong to declare that the US or the World Bank focus chiefly on agriculture today. If you want to understand the current consensus on development and aid, you should look at the MIT Poverty Lab in addition to the WB. The projects in which the MIT participates are generally much more heterogeneous and small-scale, but they achieve a high degree of success by being more scientific, not less so (which in this case it simply means to look at whether a particular measure has positive of negative effects, rather than to make sweeping statements as to whether development aid is good or bad). In any case, politics is still important, of course -but the field has gone a long way since you last checked.

Who were you hoping to work with at Princeton? I was invited by my advisor so maybe it depends on your interests...

On a related note: any news from Harvard, anyone?

I think that the same could be said of economic history within history (long ignored, but now experiencing a comeback). Within economics, I feel that history is gaining more traction as well. One of the big bestsellers in economics has been Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail, which takes a long historical view to explain uneven development. Of course, there is also Piketty, who advocates for deeper engagement with historians and who has shown why it matters to look at inequality over the very long term. Economists such as Nathan Nunn, Barry Eichengreen, and Avner Greif are producing very interesting work, yet they generally seem to shy away from quoting historians. So do historians -in his recent work on slavery and capitalism, Walter Johnson barely acknowledges the work of economists in the topic, including that of Robert Fogel or his institutional partner Nathan Nunn. I wonder if one must, necessarily, work within the framework of rational choice theory to engage with econ. Perhaps what economics could contribute to history is a deeper understanding of empirical methods (it seems rather surprising to me that most historians never learn what a p value is and it worries me that such state of affairs might turn history into a discipline that is more lax than other social sciences in determining causality). Yet I wonder how a convergence between both disciplines could take place without throwing away those things that make history unique...

Hello everyone, I thought about starting a thread about a subfield that seems to interest many of us, namely economic history. In particular, I was wondering how you envision the relationship between what economists do and what we historians do. After all, people in both departments are concerned with a similar set of questions. For instance, both disciplines have focused lately on understanding the origins of markets and capitalism, yet the methods employed could not be more different (compare, for instance, Sven Beckert to Robert Fogel or Baudrel to Daron Acemoglu). I was curious to know if you find inspiration in any economist or if you have ever felt inclined to use any of their methods (modelling, etc). I am also curious as to whether you think there will be more convergence (no pun intended) between the two disciplines or whether they will always remain far apart from each other.

Yes! De Vries did retire -I guess I was comparing him to Tracy because you pointed out that 5 years ago Wisconsin was the best in that field.

Ehm... what about Jan de Vries? He works on issues that overlap with Tracy's (Dutch economic history) and it seems to me that he is vastly more important for the field of economic history in general than Tracy. Harold Cook's recent book also seems to have been made quite a splash, and he is generally very well regarded as a historian of medicine.

Is Ralph Howard Bloch still taking students? He is legendary, but I am not sure if Yale has anyone ele in French medieval literature.

Recovering this thread. What has changed? As of 2018, what do you think that any historian is expected to have read before entering grad school, theory-wise? Also, telkanuru, do you have permission to post that syllabus on DH now?

Sarah Kay and Emily Apter are extremely influential scholars, even if I do not love the latter (Kay, though, is fantastic).

Indeed, Harvard has impressive resources for medievalists. Michael McCormick and Daniel Lord Smail are really at the top of their field, the former being the author of the most influential book on the early medieval economy and the latter doing increasingly more creative work at the intersection of history, anthropology, and science. In general, the department seems to have a big focus on the "science" of the human past, but both of them are really competent in traditional archival research as well. Some of the best students who have recently emerged from the Harvard history graduate program are medievalists too (Rowan Dorin, who got a tenure-track position at Stanford and was at the Harvard Society of Fellows, or Shane Bobrycki, who got the award to the best dissertation of the department last year).

In fact, Wisconsin might be the best or one of the very best programs in one of history's most rapidly growing subfields (Environmental History)

I doubt any serious program would send you an unofficial acceptance and then rescind it for no reason, so congrats! Where did you get in?

Who are you? It does not seem you have anything productive to add to the conversation... Why so much hate on Wisconsin? It seems quite childish to me.

where are you applying???