nocaphere

OP, you're an excellent candidate, and at another time in the history of higher ed you may have been able to pursue your dream job with confidence, but now is not that time. I'm sure you've seen all the doom-and-gloom essays on the job market, and maybe you've seen some statistics, but those things don't capture your chances in a truly accessible way. Here's a good way to measure your odds of being competitive for your dream job: Look up the wiki page for 19th century Brit Lit jobs from last year: https://academicjobs.wikia.org/wiki/Romanticism_/_Victorian_/_19th_Century_British_2020-2021 There were 3 tenure-track jobs in the United States, one of which (Hamilton College) was an ad for a specialist in the 18th and *early* 19th c. (Anything with "visiting" in the title isn't a t-t job.) Now, these are jobs that have (presumably) filled since the new academic year has started at most schools. Google the English department faculty page for each of those 3 institutions. Both St. Norbert College and Hamilton College have faculty profiles for 18th/19th c. Brit Lit Assistant Professors. The odds are high that these were the people hired for those ads from the last cycle since Assistant Professor is the lowest rank on the tenure-track. If you look up their names on Google/the Department Faculty page, you'll see their interests match each ad to a T. The faculty member who took the Norbert College job has a PhD from the University of Michigan from 2018, and the one who took the Hamilton College job has a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. The Michigan PhD grad served as an assistant professor at another SLAC prior to taking the job at Norbert (their CV is available online). There are 150+ English doctoral programs in the US. Many of those programs (100+?) will admit 19 c. specialists. Say there are 30-40 19th c. specialists entering the market with PhDs every year. (Very conservative estimate, as are all my estimates here.)There were 3 jobs last year, 1 of which went to a person moving from another tenure-track job (which may or may not be replaced at that institution). The remaining 27-37, who understandably do not want to give up on their dream, roll over onto the next cohort of applicants in next year's cycle. That's why PhDs from 2017 and 2018 are entering tenure-track jobs in the 2020 cycle. Now, this process has repeated for over a decade. Some candidates might give up and seek other types of jobs after a few years. Even with that attrition, you are conservatively looking at 150+ highly qualified 19th c. specialists, all of whom will have amazing CVs, publications, etc. (given that they persevered in grad school for 5+ years knowing the brutal market) for a pool of 3 jobs (one of which went to an 18th c. specialist!) I know it's easy to equate this to the competition for grad school admissions, but it's really an apples to oranges comparison. All candidates on the market are high achieving with stellar CVs. Many have great dissertations. The kinds of distinctions search committees make to narrow down finalists can be pretty random with such a pool of candidates. What happens to all the 19th c. specialists from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Virginia, Brown, etc.? If any of those programs produced a 19th c. specialist last year, that 19th c. specialist probably didn't get a tenure-track job (I admit, the College of New Jersey, the third t-t job last year, has not updated its Faculty page). In fact, some of those programs are likely to have produced *multiple* 19th c. specialists in the last few years who haven't landed tenure-track jobs. What you want to do with this information is your call, but I hope this answers your question of "what are my odds of getting into a prestigious PhD program" which as you say is a proxy for the question "what are my odds of landing a tenure-track job."