Strider_2931

@TMP Yes, exactly, Deep South. Unless we're talking about alligators, then it's the northern extent of their range apparently. @dr. telkanuru I wasn't accepted at IU. Unfortunate because a new environmental historian arrived there in the fall semester from KU. Also, having studied the early-twentieth century US for my MA, I am very familiar with Michael McGerr's work. They have a great resource in the Environmental Resilience Institute at IU and a new emphasis in their doctoral program on 'Histories of Slavery, Freedom and Unfreedom'. Any MA students and other future PhD applicants interested in studying late-nineteenth or twentieth century environmental justice movements, I recommend exploring IU in depth.

Thank you all for the input. My potential advisor at Program A (the program offering the 12-month stipend with the chance to be a journal assistant) echoed what was said here about the realities of success on the job market and taking on teaching responsibility as a PhD student. My potential advisor at Program A even suggested I bring up the fellowship offer to the chair of the department there to see if any extra funding could be arranged to make the prospect of foregoing the fellowship more bearable. The chair didn't budge at my question about additional financial support. His viewpoint seemed to be that the opportunity to teach and work at the journal were worth their weight in gold. Worth something to me at least is the fact that Program B offers a strong foundation in public history to go along with the fellowship. It is possible to make public history a minor field and there's a dedicated director of public history in the dept with the rank of associate professor. The PhD students I talked to spoke highly of the program's record in connecting students with faculty public history project funds and the program has coordinated summer funding for students to pursue their own public history endeavors. This is even more important to me because the Program B fellowship offers no summer money. The details of the programs/offers are fairly equal, in terms of placement record, quality of potential advisors, support through graduation/an emphasis on professional and career development. Which is the essence of the dilemma. Neither is an Ivy or prominent state school; both are R1 land-grant unis. Both offer funding ~23k. Re: cost-of-living, the stipends compare well to programs in major metro areas. Program B even provides health insurance on the fellowship and for their PhDs generally. I counted this as part of the total package in comparison to the 12-month stipend at Program A which only provides a small subsidy for PhD student health insurance.

I haven't yet posted here this cycle. I have to make a decision on two offers and I wanted to have the input of this forum when all is said and done. Maybe someone has faced a similar dilemma between a program offering better financial support and a program offering a stronger intellectual fit. The programs are equal other than this dilemma. I'll be studying twentieth-century US environmental and social history come the fall. Based on the advice I've gleaned here over the years, my instinct is to go with the program that provides a slight edge in support, via a recruitment fellowship with a release of teaching for three years. The catch is that I wouldn't be able to continue studying environmental history exclusively because the department lacks a specialist in this field. The other program offers a 12-month TAship package, with built-in research time. I've also been attracted by the year-long editorial assistantship position at the flagship environmental history journal that is housed in the department. This department actually has one of the top collections of environmental historians anywhere. So, not getting to study with this group is a significant downside in going with the program offering the recruitment fellowship. Though I would have this fellowship, and it is no doubt a prestigious and competitive award, I would have to find an outside scholar if I wanted to continue to engage with environmental scholarship. My experience with this forum has ingrained in my thinking the importance of financial support. Having three years free of a TAship, to set up and start a research plan, to write more for publication, to gain other professional experiences beyond teaching, seems to me to be the way to go. With the caveat that I wouldn't be exclusively an environmental historian upon completion of this program. Am I missing something that would change my instinct to go with the program offering the fellowship?

Like the groundhog, I checked for acceptance emails today. There were none, so that means six more weeks of winter. Or something like that... Actually, I'm curious if anyone out there heard from UIUC. I wouldn't be surprised if their acceptances went out last week and their rejections came through tomorrow. Granted, this is just speculation based on the data from last year. Northwestern rejected me on Saturday. Vanderbilt, UIUC, and BU, are the programs I ended up applying to. Just an Americanist waiting to hear back this cycle.

Which professors at Princeton are you thinking of? Last year, I considered reaching out to Keith Wailoo but I cannot recall anyone else I was considering at Princeton. I was somewhat interested in applying to HSTM programs. In the end, I did not believe I had the background knowledge or deep interest in the subject. However, I loved reading The Cure Within by Anne Harrington and I have great respect for scholars working in HSTM and in programs like MIT’s HASTS program. These types of scholars (though they're not the only ones) help to make history an interdisciplinary subject, which I believe is essential to History's survival in US higher education.

I'll gladly share a set of my research questions: How did US public health journals and missionary writings about public health over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century define and imagine the Midwest? How did these publications imagine the development of healthy populations in the Midwest compared to overseas territories, the West, and the South? In contrast, how did local sites in the Midwest consider their history, their place in the nation, and their future, in the development of their sanitation and public health programs? Truth be told, I didn't make use of research questions in my final SOPs last application cycle. This year, one of my POIs is actually requiring students interested in working with them to list five research questions in an addendum to our applications. While necessary and helpful for any research project, I wonder about the scope necessary for an SOP. This has most certainly been discussed before, and I will do my own searching of previous threads (and my own notes from previous threads). But maybe my questions can serve as a starting point for a brief exchange about high-quality research questions. I wish you good fortune in revising your SOP. If you would like to share drafts so we each can get another set of eyes on what we've written, please reach out!

I would explain my interests thematically as cultural history. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to delve too much into theories of cultural history. I'm not even sure if the descriptor 'cultural historian' is still used on a day-to-day basis at the R1 level. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to developing the theoretical underpinnings of this interest in 'cultural history'. I wrote my MA thesis on the Social Gospel as an intellectual tradition grounded in American culture of the late 19th/early 20th cent. My thesis was a close reading of a prominent liberal Protestant minister's unpublished sermons on public health and the conservation movement in this period. I drew from environmental and public health historiography, as well as histories of the Social Gospel in the US. I argued that this minister's sermons show a more complex understanding of Progressive social and environmental reform compared to previous research based predominantly on published works. My aim is to begin my SOPs by briefly discussing the sermons I studied as important historical documents and cultural artifacts. And to expand from there into discussing, for example: how it would be important to research the way missionaries exchanged public health information, and how that information was picked up domestically and used for what we would call secular public health purposes (at Illinois); or, how Social Gospel ideas about labor reform were refracted in overseas territories in the context of American imperialism (at Vanderbilt). I'm trying to use my thesis research into religious history as a springboard for the four projects. Last year, I applied emphasizing religious history, and it is my judgement that hurt rather than helped my applications. I do not want to be a religious historian, but maybe I came off that way. At the same time, I think that, given the exceptions, modern American environmental, political, and historians of capitalism, for the most part do not contextualize their histories vis-a-vis religion. I get why this is the case (for one, religious history is its own field), but I also believe it's a fair task to pursue contributions to these subfields from a perspective adjacent to religion. All of my projects connect to the history of the liberal Protestant/Social Gospel intellectual and cultural tradition in the US. This was the majority of my historiographical contribution in my master's thesis. I am going to try to do the tough work in my SOP to make sense out of where I have come from in terms of research interest and where I want to go in a doctoral program.

Hi all, I’m applying this year to PhD programs. I've lurked on this board since 2017, when I was working on my MA applications (just finished my MA this summer). After years of commenting very (very) sparsely, I’m hoping to join the conversation in this annual thread because I’m in need of some extra, clear-eyed support. I’m hoping I gain some valuable piece of information that sets my application apart from the rest. And in turn, maybe I can offer advice that helps someone else. I sent my last inquiry emails to professors this past week, and just had a good dinner of spaghetti squash and a homemade tomato sauce, so today was a good day to ‘throw my hat in the ring.’ This will be my second cycle applying to PhD programs after last year’s three rejections (Stanford, Wisconsin, Illinois) and two waitlist placements (Notre Dame and Loyola-Chicago). The DGS from one of the programs that rejected me sent a personalized rejection and offered to follow-up with a phone call (which I gladly took). I also met with one of my informal advisors who (without sugar-coating the advice) impressed on me the fine line between failure and success - especially in competitive graduate admissions. From these discussions and the feedback I received from my two waitlists, I decided to push on with one or two more cycles of applications. This year, I’m applying to Illinois to study the social and cultural history of public health in the Midwest; Northwestern and Texas to study environmental history; Vanderbilt and Boston U to study political and religious history; and the University of Chicago to study the history of economic life. One question: Is anyone else reading this applying after their first cycle? Let’s chat about this strange process we're in for. I’d be more than happy to exchange writing samples or statements of purpose/personal statements with anyone applying this cycle. Just send me a message if you're interested. I’ll have my SOP drafts done by next weekend. Another question: Did anyone else on here get accepted/decide to matriculate after years of applying? Did you apply to any of the same schools? Did your research focus change between the different application cycles? How did you stay focused and keep the demons at bay? Much appreciated.

The advice you've received so far has been stellar. I'm giving my input because of my general interest in Foucauldian theories vis-a-vis the history of science, body history, and intellectual history. Also, our research interests are very similar (which is v cool). I'd suggest reflecting on what most of the others have said or hinted at in their comments above. Before engaging directly with Foucault's corpus, you want to think about how his philosophical system can reveal certain aspects of specific historical topics and debates. You're on the right track with geology, hydropathy, and theology. However, each of those are fields of scientific inquiry and not specific enough as a source base in their own right. I'd recommend moving concepts like 'historical sociology' to the back-burner; prioritize finding a specific group of sources that have been written about in journals over the past decade or two. In other words, start with a source or a group of sources you're interested in; delve into the secondary literature that would best frame those sources; explain how you would balance what the sources reveal with the claims and arguments in the secondary literature. Foucault is going to be with you (figuratively, of course) when you attempt to rectify the sources you're analyzing in your own unique way with what the secondary literature has claimed about similar sources. From what you've brought up so far, our research interests are quite similar. I focus on the late nineteenth century US in my master's thesis, but I'm investigating 'new social norms' in light of 'scientific discoveries,' as you say. It's quite good to see someone express similar research interests. I think a more prevalent word for your concept of 'thought processes' would be epistemology. When I first read Foucault, the clarity of his elaboration on modern epistemologies was what stuck with me. I take it this is what you refer to when you say you're interested in Foucault's methods. At the basic level, as you rightly state, Foucault was philosophizing about 'critical theory + history'. But remember, he wasn't writing in English. Point being, there are many levels to dig through to settle on a professor who fits #1 and #2 of your description. I'd start with sources that show ideas from geology and hydropathy making their way through popular culture. Don't forget to note the scholars that are writing about what you're interested in and look up more of their published work.

I know U of Delaware has at least two foodways historians as well as at least one (Suisman) whose focus is on the history of sound. I wish you the best of luck in this process! Immigration, foodways, possibly the history of the senses and religious history, all seem like good thematic starting points. I applied to UD last year because of the great connections the history department has to libraries, museums, other orgs, and the related capitalism and museum studies program. UD also has a funded MA program. IIRC, an applicant for Fall 2018 who had applied as a PhD candidate was offered admission to the MA program (as a consolation after being rejected as a PhD applicant for the cycle; info vis-a-vis the results forum here). --- Also, to add my experience to the discussion of POIs...before applying, I reached out to at least ONE and up to THREE faculty per program whose research interests overlapped with mine. For me, it was either a clearly positive or clearly negative response from the POIs and this was an enormous help in focusing me on my application materials. If you can show your professionalism, your scholarly interests and acumen, and try to come off as a genuine human being through a digital medium, you're helping both sides (you and the POI) in the stressful and prolonged application process. Most faculty will be delighted to engage with (a certain amount of) student fascination with their research and the program, but the application process, rightfully so, has many more levels than potential adviser-advisee compatibility.

Hello fellow historians, I am currently about to begin a terminally funded MA program. Or, I guess the correct phrase is a terminal MA program that is funded. Over the past year and a half, I could not have arrived to where I am without the help of the good folks who do such a great service on here sharing their viewpoints. I have my tuition and fee remission and (generous?) stipend for the next two years, including summer, which is what I sought from the beginning. I am here to pay it forward, particular for those, like me, who are considering going the MA route toward a Top 10 doctoral program. Let us get this party started! If you're new here, my advice would be to soak in as much as you can. With my background and goals, I found that most of my questions had been answered before 2013. That being said, those who have eclectic, arcane, or esoteric interests, may have to search a little deeper and post a little more. And the field and job market we are interested in changes every day which may cause confusions in need of clarification. Also, I will say it is very interesting to follow the conversations up to the present and I am humbled to now feel confident enough in adding my voice to the fray. These are (no doubt) future major players in the field of history - academic or public - and it's encouraging and exciting to see personalities and viewpoints shaped and evolving with each post. Never know what you'll learn!