kotov

This might not actually apply for Romanian. Not sure though. The languages I use most are Romanian and German, along with French now and then. I doubt this helps you at all though, since I'm in a pretty specific subfield.

For me, it's a tough question. I had one reference from outside my field, because I had taken several classes with her in my minor. All of my references were tenured or tenure-track. I don't know how much of a mark it is against one's record for one's referees to be non-tenured or non-tenure-track, but the most important thing is that they can speak to your capability to do graduate-level work in your field. Can a tenured professor from outside of your field speak to that better than a non-tenured faculty member from the history department? I honestly don't know.

Romanian isn't all that difficult if you've studied French, since the language borrowed extensively from France during the period from statehood to the Second World War. The only trouble comes from the loanwords from Slavic languages, Hungarian, German, and Turkish. And the grammar is a lot more complicated since there are still three genders and case declensions, etc. But one could develop a reading knowledge of it reasonably easily if one knows French. Sorry, I know the thread was about Italian, but when my romance language of choice comes up, I can't resist the temptation to chime in.

Usually anything like that is gonna be specific to your field. Like, I got support for my dissertation research and writing from a fellowship that's specific to Holocaust studies. You might be able to find something that's specifically to support research in [whatever your field is]. You can oftentimes get funding for things like language study; I got funding to do summer language programs from a program called Title VIII, which supports people working in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, etc. You just kinda have to poke around on sites that deal with your field, etc. and talk to people in your field to find out what opportunities might be available to you.

I mean, it's not my field, but my program is big on the transnational/comparative thing so we have some faculty in it. I could recommend some books, if you'd like?

I guess I started this thread and didn't include my own topic. Whoops. I'm working on Jewish forced labor in Romania during the Holocaust. Basically looking at how forced labor related to other aspects of the Antonescu governments Jewish policy and its economic policy as a whole, and whether the state was willing to compromise its economic policies to achieve racial-ideological goals.

Or, if you aren't that far along yet, whatever you're planning on doing. If y'all don't want to disclose yours for privacy reasons, I understand that. I was just kinda trying to get an idea of what everyone here was working on at the moment.

Currently at 15 applications pending for this cycle...if you're wondering what it's like on the job market.

Good programs for East-Central Europe (good to see someone else in my field! also love the reference to Pale Fire, one of my favorite novels): Indiana University UIUC University of Pittsburgh University of Washington (I believe someone there specializes in Czechoslovakia) Boston University (Igor Lukes) University of Wisconsin Just some suggestions to get you started. I'm not in your subfield (I work primarily on Romania and Hungary), but these are all good programs in the field generally speaking and have great support for language instruction, etc.

I don't think anyone cares about my topic regardless of the methodology. The experts in my subfield like it since it's filling a hole in the historiography and there's tons of primary documentation, but it's probably not interesting to anyone outside my subfield.

I want them all to go away so they don't take any of the jobs. /southparkterkerjerbs,jpg

Let's see. I started being interested in/reading about the Holocaust during the first semester of my sophomore year of college after I had a mental breakdown and a borderline psychotic episode. I had been interested in Romania since high school when one of my friends gave a report on Ceausescu in AP Language class (for whatever reason). I actually didn't much put the two together until I was applying for grad school, after I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get together the language skills to be a competitive applicant to keep working on what I was doing in undergrad (the Holodomor and related issues). So, in my proposals, I talked (too vaguely) about working on something relating to the Holocaust in Romania, where the historiography is still emerging and there isn't a lot of specialized literature yet, like there is for, say, Germany or Hungary. This got me more than one "we'd take you but we can't support your research, sorry," but ended up working out well enough. As far as my specific project goes, it began with a paper I wrote my first semester of grad school about the Ford auto repair shop in Odessa and the use of Jewish workers there. Basically, I took it to a grad student conference and got some feedback along the lines of "this is kind of pointless unless you're gonna keep building on the forced labor thing because otherwise no one cares." I actually intended to write my dissertation on the expropriation of Jewish property in Romania, until I realized that that had already been done when I was in like, high school. So, I fell back on the forced labor thing which no one has done very much with so far and hopefully no one will do much with before I can publish this. There were hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that were largely untouched on the subject, so the resources were there and I just kind of had to go get them.

I would say take it again, mainly to improve your writing score. That's probably going to be the most important of the three as far as you getting into a Ph.D. program.

Yeah, so is selling your soul to the devil.

Uh...mine is currently about 225 pages, with one more chapter and the conclusion still to go. I figure I'll finish up somewhere between 275-300, not counting bibliography, TOC, and so forth.

I've seen a ton of Subsaharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia postings this past year. I did a minor field in Modern Middle East (my major was Modern Europe, specifically central/southeastern Europe + Holocaust studies), so hopefully I can catch a couple of those postings that are "Europe but we'd like it if you could teach non-Western too". Maybe someone somewhere will post a Southeastern Europe job, someone out there somewhere has to care, right?

My feelings about Bloodlands are...mixed... It's an enjoyable enough read, but I wouldn't necessarily put all that much stock in his thesis or some of his material regarding the Holodomor. I got it to use it for my senior thesis in undergrad (not long after it came out) and ultimately ended up going mostly with other sources.

Whenever I read for a course, I wasn't reading the entire book, I was just reading to get a grasp on the author's arguments and evidence, so that's hard to gauge. It takes me about an hour to get through 100 pages of microfilmed documents, I guess?

I think we probably have something like five to ten funded MA students (including those who are in the Ph.D. program straight out of undergrad) and another probably thirty to forty others (a good number of whom are teachers in the area). I could be off on these numbers though.

It is interesting. Not "good", but interesting.

Still better than Jared Diamond. Also, I guess that Shirer guy was alright.

The last two posters really kinda hit what I think would be the best answer: try to take some of that research you did for your MA thesis and turn it into an article. I guess the only pitfall is if you end up using your MA thesis as a starting point for your dissertation, but I don't think having one article based on the research is going to prevent someone from publishing your dissertation several years from now.

I've honestly started reading a lot more once I got through with my exams, just because now I'm focusing more specifically on what really interests me. It also helped that my language skills (especially German) got better, so now I can work through a lot of the foreign-language texts for my work and sub-field (I work on southeastern Europe and the Holocaust, so a great deal of the literature in my field is in German). I got better about reading secondary literature because I had to basically.

I have a book chapter coming out (hopefully shortly); I found the call for papers for the volume on H-Net (this was in like the spring of 2012 if you want an idea of how long this kind of thing takes).

Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pitt all have strong programs in Russian/Eastern European. Plenty of others. What area specifically?