anonymousbequest

Congrats on the Met internship (if I read your stats right)! Gossip below stairs among the assistants put the number of applicants for the paid positions this summer at 1500.

Congrats! I hope you get the internship and enjoy the experience working there. NB, the latest director of the Met is a tapestry expert, and there is almost no field more overlooked than that.....

If this is true, I actually applaud Chicago for it's decision not to take any modernists, though I know it is tough for a lot of the applicants. Balance in specializations needs to be maintained for the larger good of the discipline, and if I may sound so melodramatic, for the retention and production of knowledge. Areas like ancient and medieval (which are far more difficult than modern and contemporary because of languages and harder to access research materials--part of the reason why fewer people take them on) are dying. Looking toward the future, there are going to be a huge number of newly minted PhDs in modern/contemporary chasing a limited number of positions, which will only contribute to the erosion of tenure and the increasing number of "temps", adjuncts with no insurance working for slave wages. Art history, and the other humanities, may need to start discounting what a prospective applicant "likes" and start assigning them specializations, taking up a model similar to that found in the hard sciences and medicine. Chicago has always been known for its role in shaping social policy, they may be at the forefront of a coming trend. It also could be that the modernists at Chicago have too many students right now and don't feel they can take on any new people. There are lots of reasons why this info might be true. And to say that queenofprussia went to far is not in keeping with the tone of this entire forum, which is completely based on rumor and innuendo seems silly. Everyone is clamoring for inside information, she gave you some.

Just because many professors are going to CAA doesn't mean that they are deciding on you. One of the UIUC profs is on a year-long fellowship in California, and isn't going to CAA, for example, but apparently they are making decisions. And many departments are interviewing for faculty positions, which are much more meaningful to them than any of you. So chillax. You are in or out, nothing to be done now.

Hi Borromini's Girl, I also got my MA from UMass. I agree with everything you said about the program. Members of my cohort and those within 5 years of me were accepted to PhD programs at Hopkins, IFA, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, MIT, UCSB, UDel, WUSTL, Rutgers, Iowa, OhioU, and several others. The program is a bit of an odd duck because they do a series of comprehensive exams rather than a thesis, which imo is great training for general knowledge in art history, and good preparation for PhD qualifying exams. Sometimes, a student is invited to develop a seminar paper in their major area for publication rather than take that part of the comps. I did this, as did another student in my cohort, and both papers ended up in leading peer reviewed journals. I'm guessing that you did something like this too, when you say you had your thesis published? Monika is great, I took a seminar on the history of collecting with her.. The UMass program would be better known if it were not near Williams or at a big state school. Good luck in your PhD applications!

I think it depends on whether you want to pursue a PhD in the future. If so, you should look for programs that have a track record of being able to send students on. The dirty secret of a lot of MA programs in art history is that they are basically dead ends, either because they are not seen as rigorous enough to prepare students for more advanced work, or the professors do not have much clout. A lot of them are just cash cows for their schools. Williams is a great MA program, and funded. You spend your first winter abroad. UCR is the only terminal MA in Southern California to consider, and has some funding. If you are not thinking of future study, it might be a good fit if you want to stay in SoCal. However, they do not have seem to have sent many students on to PhD programs. I'd nix Tufts, in New England, aside from Williams, you might want to look at UMass Amherst, which traditionally has been able to send students to top 20 PhD program with some regularity. Avoid the New York terminal MAs. DO NOT get one of those one-year terminal MAs in Europe. They are useless. The only program to consider is the Courtauld.

I think lower than that, bottom 10-15. It is small, and I don't think I've run into anyone who did their work there (anecdotal of course). I want to say that it's heavily oriented toward theory (or was). But my advice is always-- if you like the work of a professor there, it's worth looking at whether their students are competitive for the big CASVA, ACLS, etc... fellowships and whether they become working academics and/or curators. If you are starting to be anxious that you aren't going to be among the 3-5 applicants accepted by each of the the top 20 programs this year (with the exception of Yale and Harvard which might offer 6-8 spots), I might suggest CUNY or Rutgers as better "safetys".

They were one of the surprises in the latest NRC rankings, coming in the top tier in a few categories. My advice is always to choose schools based on professors whose scholarship most interests you, and then secondarily how those professors' students have fared in the academic and museum markets over the years. The only prof. I know anything about at Temple is Alan Braddock, who is doing interesting "eco-critical" work in American art, but is relatively young. I think it's wise to look at schools like Temple, which are outside the range of the 7-9 graduate programs everyone on gradcafe seems to be applying to (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, IFA, Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Hopkins). I feel bad for all of these gradcafers interested in modern European art competing with each other for a very slim number of slots because they think if they don't go to the schools mentioned above they are destined to work at Barnes & Noble the rest of their lives. Other programs I might put in the "overlooked" category that have successful students in a variety of fields are CUNY, Rutgers, UNC, UCSB, UCLA, Delaware, WUSTL Maryland, Duke, Emory, Indiana, UT, and Michigan. Always remember that one of the historically poorly ranked PhD programs in art history is an Ivy, Cornell, so it's not always about the "name". This is of course an anecdotal list.

Paid or unpaid? I would not move anywhere for an unpaid internship, even MOMA. A paid internship on the other hand, looks great on your CV, particularly if you work on an exhibition and can also add that line to your bona fides. Places like MOMA have a billion interns from all over the place, from PhD candidates at the Institute to freshwomen at Barnard, and it's doubtful you will have significant face time with curators, as an unpaid intern, to make it worthwhile. Also, MOMA curators often don't have PhDs, (the exception in the museum world these days) and would not be your best option for recommendation letters down the line. Don't let the bright lights of New York blind you to the reality of paying someone for the honor of doing their grunt work, just as you should not be a sheep herded into applying to the same 7 schools as everyone else by the fear of never getting a job.

I've heard from a faculty member that Berkeley is planning on taking 3 grad students total this year because of funding. Sven Spieker at UCSB is great & well-loved, but know that UCSB is also only planning on taking 2-3 this year. However, I'm not sure whether their modernist, Laurie Monahan, has many students so she may be interested in accepting someone. Michigan, which I also saw mentioned here by someone, is down to 4 from their usual 6 admits, and I think Stanford may be in the same boat (also both those programs did terribly in the latest NRC rankings btw, not that anyone cares about these things of course). So I would say choose your schools very strategically this year, particularly for modern/contemporary which seems to be the most trendy period right now among undergrads. Yale and Harvard are the only programs that are said to be unaffected and will take their usual numbers. CUNY, Columbia, and the IFA probably will too, but students there are often funded through "parental fellowships".