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mobydickpic

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    2020 Fall

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  1. I have the same question. Because this is a problem that is likely to affect almost everyone planning to matriculate in fall 2020, I actually think it makes sense to try organizing communications with other admitted students (as in to say: we cannot consider accepting this offer if we cannot know, by April 15, that our seats in the program and funding package will be protected in the case of a delayed or altered start to the fall 2020 semester), or even to appeal to the consortium of many schools that agree on the April 15 deadline, to also form an agreement about protecting incoming students, to which they are all bound? That said, the guarantee would most likely need to come from graduate schools (like the Graduate School of Arts and Science of any given school), not individual programs (which to my knowledge, often have limited authority over things like funding).
  2. is anybody else afraid that incoming cohorts will be forced to reapply, if programs are suspended/schools don't open normally in the fall ..?
  3. i am completing undergrad right now and am concerned that i will have a lot of trouble completing my thesis, in light of these new stressors. the library at my university is closed, i am likely being forced to move, and i was already behind.
  4. has anyone still had total radio silence from Brown English?
  5. Hi all, I am reaching out to anyone who applied to Stanford's PhD English program, which had a Dec. 3 deadline. Do others' application portal checklists still read as "incomplete"? I figure it takes them a while to link official GRE scores to applications so I'm not super worried, but in any case, I was wondering if it's just me or if other people are seeing this, too...
  6. I have submitted all my applications, and I am having some random anxieties about logistical things. First and foremost, my transcript documents that I submitted. All the programs that I applied to (PhD English mostly) asked that applicants fax a copy of their transcripts and upload them. I faxed the pages of my transcript which have my actual grades, but I did not include the generic legend that my college encloses within all official transcripts (which explains the meanings of random notations like CR-credit or S-satisfactory, as well as the 4.0 GRE scale and the value of each grade). I go to a university in the US that uses a 4.0 scale (and am only applying to US-based programs), so I figured this wouldn't be necessary. However, now I'm anxious that my transcript will be seen as incomplete, because in most of my applications, I didn't include a digital facsimile of this legend page — I only scanned the pages which have my own grades, GPA, etc. Also, I'm worried that random scores I have on my transcript will cause alarm even though they're actually normal/positive (like CR which means credit, or S which means Satisfactory, and which I have for courses that are always exclusively graded on that scale rather than A through F, such as creative writing and PE classes at my school). I developed this anxiety before submitting my final 3/12 apps, so this concern only applies to nine of my applications... So, I wanted to see if you all could either calm my nerves or validate my fears! Does your school include a legend like this on the transcript, and if so, did you scan this page and include it in your applications? Or did you have the same impulse as me that schools don't want/need it from peer institutions with the same 4.0 grading scale? Thanks!
  7. This is so helpful, thank you. I think my next step will be more strategically using footnotes, rather than seeing direct engagement as the only way to merit bringing in secondary sources, but to bring in a strong overview of pre-existing scholarship on the text(s) I'm working with. (For this reason and a few others, I am also going to slightly expand my engagement with one of the primary texts, and shrink the other two).
  8. I agree with this, and two advisors in my undergrad gave me this exact advice after proofreading my SOP. However, I've noticed that some department websites explicitly ask for this info to be covered in SOPs. Some of them include it in a list that is framed as suggestions, whereas others imply that the SOP should address every question. I wonder if such programs would find it off-putting to ignore the question. That said, maybe one way to interpret the question (which is usually more like "what would you do with the degree?") would be not to use the formulaic "I want to be a TT professor but could use my degree for xyz alt ac things," but rather to describe the specific ways that resources in the school would inform the specific research or teaching you'd want to do in your career (for example: digital humanities, emphasis on archival work, etc. etc.) Finally, and sort of contradicting my first point, one thing I've noticed is this: my undergraduate advisor is the DGS for our school's PhD English program (which is an R1 program that I've seen many students here applying to). A lot of the time, when I've referenced the requirements listed on the webpage of our department, she's responded as though the website is out-of-date and isn't necessarily relevant to her expectations. (For example, our program says that the GRE subject test is strongly recommended, whereas she said that most students don't submit it, and she literally never thinks about it). That may be specific to her personality/how our department is structured (and sometimes, our department feels more informal than many similar ones, based on impressions I get from research and conversations), but either way, I wonder how common it is for department webpages to be less-than-perfect gauges of departments' true expectations.
  9. My writing sample provides a close reading of three primary texts in 20 pages. This endeavor makes it difficult to go particularly deep into the existing scholarly conversation on any one of these texts. However, I feel that the close reading is robust, and there's some reference to secondary sources (mostly 21st century monographs and chapters) related to the texts that I am discussing, as well as overarching theoretical lenses from two or three contemporary scholars who speak to many of the ideas that I am highlighting in these novels. Do you think it's more important to conceptualize a project and prove that I am able to read closely/write decently, or to zoom in onto one text and go deep into other scholars' readings of it? Any success stories related to writing samples that relied primarily on close reading that situated it into a broader theoretical landscape but lacked a totally comprehensive literature review?
  10. Hi all, happy to introduce myself as a 2020 applicant. I am currently a senior in my undergraduate program and am planning to apply to 10-12 programs during this cycle; I am currently honing my list. My period of primary interest falls around 1750-1830, the latter half of the "long" 18th century, with occasional forays into the Victorian period. Specifically, I am interested in material feminist readings of British abolition, literary depictions of the British East India Company, eighteenth century foreshadowings of communism, depictions of incarceration in the British Empire (especially India), anti-colonial book histories, and the materialist history of modern gender as read through fictional and legal prose on sex/sex work/pornography. Many of my projects engage equally with the 18th and 19th centuries, and I hope to trouble the dominant reading of the 18th century as a period in which identity was invented primarily through rethinking the self/the individual, and instead look toward labor histories, collectivism, and material feminist epistemologies to understand the "invention of the self" as an insidious project intended to prepare for a then-unnameable, yet imminent and likely predicted, global turn toward socialism. Lately, much of my work experiments with the digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on geographic imaging systems (GIS) and an increasing interest in quantitative approaches to narrative/novel studies. I look forward to engaging more with (and hopefully contributing as much as I can to) this community of support, and please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss any common interests!
  11. You should look at Brandeis University. One professor you may be interested in working with is Emilie Diouf, who studies trauma and film. She is in the English department doing research on women, trauma, Anglophone/Francophone African film, critical theory, etc. The graduate student whom she currently advises studies trauma from a different cultural context. Caren Irr is also great for contemporary film here. David Sherman studies mourning and elegy. And Jerome Tharaud studies American religion and literature.
  12. Hi all, I have a question as someone looking ahead to applying to English PhD programs in the coming Fall! When researching programs, I have often looked through the departments' current grad students' profiles. My project stands at the intersection of two subfields. Several programs I'm interested have one (or occasionally two) faculty who are working directly at this intersection, as well as another couple faculty working in each of the two subfields of interest but not combining them. That said, I've noticed some programs seem to have a small handful of active graduate students currently who seem to be taking on projects that combine my two subfields of interest. How do people think I should read this in terms of assessing "fit"? When I see that a school already has some graduate students doing work directly related to mine, is that a good sign of "fit" because it means that the program is open to supporting people like me? Or, is it a sign that they may be "maxed out" on support in my subfields and therefore especially unlikely to take me, because like I said, most schools don't have a ton of faculty in either of my subfields of interest, let alone doing work at their intersections? I know it's always a crapshoot, but I am trying to be as strategic as possible. Thanks for any input!
  13. Hi all, I am currently working on picking a third recommender for my PhD applications. About 2/3 of the programs I'm applying to are pure English, and the other 1/3 are cultural studies or theory-based programs (think Duke Literature, Stanford MTL, Berkeley Rhetoric, etc.). I am applying straight from BA; I'm currently an undergraduate English major. My first two recommenders (who I've already settled on) are both from my undergraduate English department, and I am confident that both of those letters will be very strong. For my third recommender, however, I have two options, and I'd love to hear some feedback on which would be better. The first option is a professor who's a scholar of cultural philosophy and critical theory (which are relevant to my interests in literary studies). However, the problem is, he's actually a professor in the Health studies department (his work focuses on global health and human rights using methods from critical theory and continental philosophy), so he is not affiliated with English at all. I will mention, his PhD is in the Humanities, even though the department he's listed in is considered a social science by my university. That all being said, he knows me really well; I've taken a grad seminar with him, written an extensive research paper under his guidance that included literary criticism, and I think he'd write a compelling letter for me. The second option is a professor in the English department with whom I took a small undergraduate seminar, but I just don't know if she'd write quite as strong a letter. Perhaps she would; I don't feel like I'm choosing between a great option and a bad one or anything, but I just don't feel quite the same closeness with her and she hasn't struck me as someone who would necessarily write quite as deep or compelling a letter. For critical theory-oriented programs outside of traditional English departments, I'm definitely going to use the first option as my third letter. However, for applications to pure English departments, would a letter from the first option (the health studies professor with a critical theory background) risk seeming irrelevant because he's unaffiliated with the English department, regardless of the letter's content? I don't think the other professor would write a weak letter or anything (I think either way I'd get at least a good letter if not a great one), but I'd feel most comfortable choosing the first option, as long as a third letter from a professor in a seemingly unrelated field wouldn't be taken less seriously. After all, I'd rather have a positive third letter that would at least be taken seriously, than an excellent third letter that would be disregarded for the irrelevance of its writer. What would you do?
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