Imenol

Any advise as to how to find off-campus housing from far away, since we will not go to the US any time soon?

How come someone has been accepted to Harvard's English PhD already??

"Having said all this, I cannot help but note that this prescription conforms broadly to the vision of layers of time developed by Fernand Braudel and the Annales School. He spoke of structures, enduring features – changing glacially if at all, that constrained human action and of events, mere events, that were as numerous as they were fleeting, and powerless to change anything of importance. But in between these two extremes of historical time he located something called conjuncture. Here events and structures came together in fateful ways. Just what happened in this middle range of historical time, where combinations and sequences of action reset what we might call “the course of events” was only sketched out, and this mysterious category of time was often the butt of jokes by less visionary, more down-to-earth historians. Then historians had few allies among the social scientists. Today there are a good number – a critical mass? ‒ of historical social scientists seeking an historicized understanding of this realm where agency and structure confront each other, and, if I am right, a new era in which historians will seek to offer coherent explanations of change in the past." The great historian Jan de Vries, on "the return from the return to narrative."

Material culture seems to be growing as well. In general, there seems to be a trend of looking beyond texts: to material culture, the natural environment, and the built environment as well.

Got an invitation for an on-campus interview at the Spanish & Portuguese Department at Princeton! So glad

What about Yale? Both Carlos Eire and Keith E. Wrightson teach there -it looks to me like quite a great combination for anyone wanting to work on the Reformation!

Hello, Does any couple have any experience with Harvard GSAS housing? I have not been able to find much... Does Harvard offer affordable rooms for couples? Is it possible for two people to share a large room in one of Harvard's residence halls? (a large room in Richards, for instance?)

This has also been very useful to me, marketing it as a job where you teach etc in addition to research. It also helps that I come from a country (Spain) where the average salary falls well below the stipend of a top PhD program.

Panofsky is great of course, and I find Baxandall endlessly fascinating, although I would have picked The Limewood Sculptures over Painting and Experience. What about Georges Kubler? Is there any better initial sentence than "Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world."

I always find it valuable to step out of your area of focus and read broadly, across different periods and methodologies. I second the recommendations of Anthony Grafton (delightful book reviews too!) and Lorraine Daston. I add Peter Brown, Moses Finlay, Caroline Walker Bynum, Thomas Bisson, Daniel Lord Smail (esp. Legal Plunder), David Niremberg, Bernard Bailyn, Peter Galison, Robert Danton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Simon Schama, Carlo Ginzburg, George Chancy, Walter Johnson, Linda Colley. Of those who are dead, I would add Edward Gibbon, with his delightful footnotes, Richard Cobb, John Boswell, Henri Pirenne, Tacitus, Peter Laslett... I would also be remiss not to add the delightful French historians: Braudrel (is there any better first quote than "I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt because I am a Northerner like so many on whose footsteps I have followed"?), Marc Bloch, Philippe Aries, Emmanuel Ladurie, Georges Duby... (So many!)

Writing came to a 5.0, which is fine for me. Fingers crossed!

As a matter of fact, if you want to do Egyptian you should probably consider Berkeley (Whitney Davis). Also, I remain skeptical of an advisor-centered approach. Yes, your advisor is important. But there are other things that matter too: teaching load, stipends, resources, connections, etc etc. Of course, it is true that you need to apply to a top program with an advisor that fits your interests (even if only to secure admissions). But if Joseph Leo Koerner leaves Harvard next year for OSU, that does not make OSU as good as Harvard for someone who wants to do a PhD with Koerner, regardless of funding packages. Also, in order to overcome this impasse, I suggest an approach based on Rawls' veil of ignorance. Let us imagine that we need to pick a PhD program without knowing what our field will be once we arrive there. How will we order our preferred programs?

Which would you say are the hottest trends right now (meaning topics/approaches rather than specific periods)? Is it material culture, environmental history of the digital bent (GIS and stuff), "global" history/mobility studies?

I have not seen any recent discussion on the international job market for PhD students in History. It seems to me that, while some people might do Post-Docs abroad, most return to the US for longterm teaching positions. Is there any reason for this? Is the international market more dire or less welcoming of American PhD students, or does this reflect geographical preferences? While a fair share of people do go to the UK, I am struck by the low numbers of people who decide to teach in other countries with strong academic communities, such as France or Germany. Do language skills also play a part? Or are those positions tilted towards domestic applicants? As someone from Italy considering to do a PhD at the US, I wonder about opportunity o return to Europe.

Hey! I thought I would start a thread to share books and articles that people have found influential in their own thinking. The point is not to make a list of great books, but rather to get a better sense of which books have resonated with people on a particular way, perhaps shaping our choices of subfield or our decision to pursue art history. From the top of my head, I can think of Kubler's The Shape of Time, Koerner's Bosch and Bruegel, Nagel and Wood's Anachronic Renaissance, Alper's The Art of Describing, Bahrani's The Graven Image, and Michael Baxandall's The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. What about you? Which books have influenced you and why?

Yes, but consider the fields in which both scholars work. Anthony Grafton is vastly more influential than Ann Blair in early modern europe, whereas Peter Brown's influence in Late Antiquity/Early Medieval stuff is simply unparalleled, even if I do think that McCormick is an excellent scholar and his Origins of the European Economy is one of the great economic history books, of any period. Simply put, it is hard for me to see evidence of a substantial difference between Princeton and Harvard, while that index seems to imply that there is one.

Do these numbers reflect actual differences in quality? Is Harvard really significantly better than, say, Princeton? I guess it depends on your subfield, but it is hard for me to find many people in the ranks of the Harvard faculty that have exerted a comparable influence in their fields as some Princeton profs. I mean, I haven't checked when this study was made, but is there anyone at Harvard who is, to his subfield, as influential as Peter Brown to Late Antiquity or Anthony Grafton and Natalie Zemon Davis to Early Modern Europe or Linda Colley to Modern Britain?

I know it all depends on your advisor and blah blah but which are, in your opinion, the 10 best programs for a PhD in history (let us use here an alternative of Rawls' veil of justice: imagine you cannot know which field you will be working in, which PhD program will you pick to maximize your chances regardless of the period you end up studying). I guess it could look like this: 1) Princeton 2) Yale 3) Harvard 4) Berkeley 5) U-Michigan 6) Columbia 7) U-Chicago 8) Stanford 9) NYU 10) UPenn. Thoughts? Who wants to join the name-dropping fun?

I know it all depends on your advisor and blah blah but just for the fun of it: 1) Harvard 2) Princeton 3) NYU/IFA 4) Yale 5) Columbia 6) U-Chicago 7) Berkeley 8) Stanford ("presentists" as they are) 9) U-Michigan 10) UPenn Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Criticisms of my inherently flawed premise? I welcome them all.

I know it all depends on your advisor and blah blah but just for the sake of the fun: 1) Harvard 2) Princeton 3) NYU/IFA 4) Yale 5) Columbia 6) U-Chicago 7) Berkeley 8) Stanford ("presentists" as they are) 9) U-Michigan 10) UPenn Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Criticisms of my inherently flawed premise? I welcome them all.

Who are you hoping to work with at Harvard? I have also applied for a PhD there, with a focus on medieval Europe. Harvard is extremely competitive -it is impossible to assess your chances based solely on grades. Quite simply, I am sure that some people get accepted with worse stats that you, but I am also sure that people are routinely rejected with perfect or near-perfect scores, great linguistic skills, and outstanding recommendation letters. I imagine that living in Russia is an asset, but I don't think anyone would apply to a PhD with a focus on Russia without having spent some time in the country and without mastering the language first.

Hey, I did not contact all my POI during the application process (I did contact some, especially old people and those from my 2 top programs). I thought it would not be a big deal, but I keep on reading posts stressing the importance of contacting them. Could someone clarify if this is a crucial part of the application process? Should I still write to them now?

Hello, I recently received my GRE scores and I am afraid they might not be enough to pass the cutoffs for the top programs I am applying for (Brown, Harvard, IFA...). My estimated scores are 161 verbal and 154 quantitative (significantly below my practice tests!). I have an undergraduate degree from Brown University with a major GPA of 3.91. I focus on Medieval architecture. Please be honest!

Thank you for the invitation and the advice! Sadly, I am at Cambridge now and will not be going back to Providence any time soon :/