FiguresIII

DUKE INTERVIEW I AM ECSTATIC

That's reassuring, thanks! I think they'll be nice about it, maybe it's something that made me stand out. I do engage with the argument in depth. In any case the interview should mostly be about future work, so i don't expect it'll be a big deal.

Damn I just realized that I mention one of the profs who's interviewing me at Chicago in a footnote in my sample, and what's more, that I take issue with their entire argument in the work I cite. HMMM this is about to be interesting.

Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities by Eric Hayot is a goldmine.

At 3am Duke be like, u up? And we, despairingly, answer in the affirmative.

I got my email at 11:41pm (I'm in Europe), not sure. When I first saw snorkles post I didn't have an email yet either...

Yes!!!! Got it ! Not really personalized but it does say who will be interviewing me.

Congrats to all those Wisconsin acceptances, great program !

anyone claiming that yale comp lit interview?

On the other hand it would be a Sisyphean effort to interview - nearly - all candidates??

Yea well I'm still not sure it's something all applicants received because it's not the DGS or a POI emailing... Maybe I'll retract that results post hahah

yes OMG it's me! It's an invitation to fill out a doodle poll for availability for Skype interviews. -- I'm also the Yale Comp Lit interviewee if anyone has been wondering about that! I expected to hear nothing for at least another month but this has turned out to be an INSANE day!!

Yes to free reading and exercise. Plus good vibes in this thread are definitely helping me. If our cohorts are anything like how people are here we'll be more than fine!

mostly fine haha one day at a time, as they say... but every hour or two i do get that feeling of standing in an elevator when suddenly it drops ever so slightly it's nice to have more time for friends, for random activities, and for reading a whole book in one go! like today, I just finished giovanni's room and am still catching my breath what would you say your areas are? it's less clear to me what the delimited subfields in comp lit are, or whether they translate from english to comp lit (in english i have a good sense of what's there, like poco, ecocrit, performance etc)

@pdh12 fellow comp lit person here! applied to harvard, yale, princeton, nyu, duke (literature - i guess it's most like comp lit...)

I was just jolted out of my late-afternoon dip by an email from Harvard GSAS asking me to submit additional information. Turns out they wanted me to fill out a form regarding foreign language study (I'm applying to Comp Lit). I'm pretty sure I already provided that info in the application...

If you're into queer theory and still cling, desperately, to intimate close readings, Kevin Ohi's Dead Letters Sent is a goldmine. It was a game changer for my undergrad thesis. Especially the introduction and the chapter on the Symposium blew me away. I think you can access it on JSTOR.

Can confirm this hearsay! I've talked to a PhD alum who's now a postdoc in Chicago's English dept. and he has confirmed both that history and that it is completely different now. He's told me he found his mentors smart, eager to collaborate, and the department full of intellectual energy. And he mentioned individual mentorship in each of the years, increasing support on placement and guiding people onto the market. The one thing he did mention as negative was the fact that the university did not approve a grad student's union, despite overwhelming support from students and faculty. But that stuff has been happening at plenty of other places, too...

Finally got around to reading Americanah this week, which is embarrassingly late given that Adichie gave a speech during my graduation ceremony... As an international student in the US I was delighted by her sharp satire of the follies of American college life. Favorite moment was probably the passage where she describes how Ifemelu feels an ambivalent pride when others tell her she sounds "so American" or has "no accent," and that she wears the compliment like a "garland"--such a frisson of recognition! I wish I was proud of my accent but it grates my ears and at this point I cant even "do" it without sounding like a parody of my compatriots. Also very excited to start reading Anil Ramdas, a Surinam critic, essayist, and novelist who writes in Dutch.

As I'm sure we all have, I've gone through some quite a few phases. As an undergrad, I was mostly interested in European modernism, queer theory, and critical theory (a la Ranciere, Jameson, Sianne Ngai). I've since switched to modernist and contemporary novels from the Caribbean and the diaspora (primarily francophone for the moment, think: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Condé). I still love theory but I'm now broadly studying alternative temporalities across a range of fields (poco, Black Studies, queer theory, phenomenology). I've applied to Comp Lit programs as well as English programs that seemed hospitable to what is in essence a comparative project... We'll see who will have me!

Just got my last app (10/10) in at UC Berkeley ! I'm also very happy to report that I have found a hobby to keep me occupied (beyond normal work, ofc): drawing! I'll have to make sure I don't start drawing the portraits of my POIs....

I'm erring on the side of specificity and letting my general interests sort of filter through. Personally, I find it easier to write persuasively that way. My advisors / grad school friends have also told me it's more of a formal exercise than a contract anyway. Professors expect that your interests and perhaps even your period will change. They want to be able to shape you. In the statement you just show that you have a sense of what a dissertation project and a potential contribution to the field could look like. It's also about showing general curiosity, an interesting intellectual trajectory, and the ability to present it all in a convincing, concise way. After all, you'll be writing statements like this for most of your academic career: for fellowships, grants, job applications, and so on. Again, take all this with a grain of salt, it's just what I've been told and what makes sense for me. Although I do mention specific professors I'd like to work with, I'm less focused on that w/r/t where I'm applying. Professors may not turn out to be as great as you thought, or they might get poached or retire. I'm just looking for an intellectual community--a network of people--that does the kind of work I can see myself doing or benefiting from. That means I'm also looking at neighboring universities, publications/presses and the kind of work they publish, what grad students are doing, and the kinds of workshops / conferences/ talks that take place. I'm not submitting a sample written in another language, just a paper in English on literature written in another language. Comp Lit people usually just write in English, right, especially in the US?

One of my statements has pretty extensive lit-review style footnotes besides general citations, and my undergrad advisor said to keep them. I use them to show how my project targets a blind spot in a scholarly conversation both within and beyond the specific field I'm working on.

Good call, thanks. So I'll probably have to decide then, but that also means I can add other programs... oh man, back to scouring faculty pages

Hi all! Just took the GRE and figured I'd start posting here now that major step is taken... My 'unofficial' scores are 159Q and 170V, and 720 on the GRE Lit. Doing both comp lit and English apps. Some at the same place (I hope that's not frowned upon, lol). I just have such disparate SOPs. Still, my main fields will probably be Postcolonial Studies + African American and Afro-diaspora Literature + Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American/British Literature. One of my SOPs is about postcolonial historical fiction, the other about Edouard Glissant. And one random one (for Princeton English) mostly continuing where my undergrad thesis left off (on what I called 'reading for style') Contemplating Berkeley also but I've heard that the funding situation can be precarious... Anyone got input on that?