kotov

Basically this. Just think about things that you would like to know about within your broad area of interest; when you come to something that you can't find any information on, well, there you go.

Right, this is the other thing for me. No one has really written more than a few pages in a book or a short article in an obscure Romanian journal on my topic. There's plenty out there on property confiscation (which I had considered writing on) but nothing on forced labor, which I was interested in anyway, since it's a good place to analyze my real interest, the interaction between racial ideology and economic rationality.

I was looking for some advice on where/with what materials I might go about learning Slovak. It's not an urgent need but I have an idea for a second or perhaps third project subsequent to my dissertation for which I would need to read Slovak. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

My specific dissertation topic was the result of the seminar paper I wrote my first semester of grad school and the subsequent feedback I got on it from a professor at a small graduate student conference in my field. As far as being interested in Romania/Southeastern Europe more broadly? I haven't a clue. I studied Russian history in undergrad, in which I first became interested by reading Doctor Zhivago, but.

I thought about it but I didn't know if I could master speaking in tongues for the language requirement...

Just bought Keith Hitchins' Rumania 1866-1947 (which I'm embarrassed not to have read yet) and Carol Iancu's La Shoah en Roumanie.

1. Anywhere that will give me tenure 2. No seriously, anywhere 3. Please, someone? 4. HALP

In the case of my program, basically everyone is funded through teaching assistantships. The unique thing we have though, is that everyone has to study abroad for a year at another university, and during that time you're paid by fellowship rather than teaching assistantship; in retrospect, I would've loved to have taught in Germany, as long as it would've been auf Englisch, but. Basically, I'd agree with the above poster; most places are going to either fund through TAships and some are going to fund through fellowships, with some places in the former category having some competitive fellowships for their students. Our department doesn't have any sort of competitive fellowships, so aside from the year of fellowship everyone gets by default, any fellowship funding you get is on your own. There's a big push once you get to be ABD to start applying for external research/writing fellowships, so thankfully I hit that lottery. If I were you, I'd just comb through the graduate student page/list/whatever of the departments I was applying to and see if they explain how they generally fund their students; some places will list the courses for which their grad students are TAs or something like that.

Oh man, that first part of your list reads about like the syllabus for our Modern German readings course second year of grad school, haha. The Peculiarities of German History is also one of my favorite books, although I'm not a Germanist per se. I suppose everyone who works in Holocaust studies has to be to some extent, but my actual dissertation work doesn't actually deal with like, the national history of Germany very much. What area/period of German history are you working on, if I may ask?

Yeah, especially if you're applying for a more broadly-defined position (like if the field of specialization is just supposed to be somewhere in modern Europe), then it's likely enough that the members of the search committee aren't really going to know/care that your advisor is a big deal in your field/subfield. My perspective when I was applying (which hasn't changed much) was that, especially if you're not at a top-tier university or whatever, is that it's way more important to find someone who's interested in your work and with whom you think you'll be comfortable talking with a lot and working with over a five-plus year span. EDIT: I will clarify that, in my case, even though I'm not at a big university, my advisor is someone most people in German/Holocaust studies would have at least heard of, and who's written a couple of well-known books, but that wasn't why I made the choice that I did at the time. It was more about the fact that he and I had spoken several times during the application cycle and got along pretty well and that he seemed interested in my general area of work (even though I hadn't defined very well what I wanted to do at the time). As it was, I ended up picking my dissertation topic based on the paper I wrote for his seminar my first semester of grad school, so it worked out well.

There are very few minorities in Jewish history/Holocaust studies, and very few in Eastern European as well. I'm not really sure why this is.

Literally all of the domestic students in my department are white. Then again, if you've ever been to that part of Michigan, it's not exactly unrepresentative of the area...

I wish I had done more in terms of familiarizing myself with the existing literature on my field/subfield. I guess this works a bit differently in the social sciences than the natural sciences, but the same principle applies. Absolutely take advantage of whatever resources your library has (i.e., interlibrary loan, JSTOR, etc.) to get a hold of anything you can read, even if you don't have a well-defined direction in which you want to take your thesis work yet. In fact, reading the other works in the field you're interested in is a good way to familiarize yourself with what work's already been done and what still needs to be done, so it can help you find a direction for your research in addition to giving you the background info you need to do your research.

Now I'm waiting for my copy of ,,Chestiunea Evreiasca" în documente militare române, 1941-1944 by Ottmar Trasca to arrive from Romania...so maybe I'll see it before April. In the meantime, working my way through România si Transnistria: Problema Holocaustului, edited by Viorel Achim and Constantin Iordachi, the former of whom I met at a conference in London last month. #namedropping Still picking through the book I mentioned in my last post as well, but mostly just for taking notes at this point.

It's bigger than when I applied four years ago...and got rejected, obvs.

Digging up an ancient thread here, but figured OP wouldn't mind since it didn't get many replies the first time around. My dissertation is on Jewish forced labor in Romania during WWII. The main questions I'm looking at are how the Antonescu regime (specifically the Army General Staff) balanced economic rationality and productivity versus racial ideology in the organization of the system and deployment of workers, and the role that forced labor played within the regime's overall policy toward the country's Jews. Most of my material is from the archives of the Romanian Ministry of National Defense and from the Military Cabinet of the Council of Ministers, but I'm also looking at the reports created by the commanders of labor camps and detachments, as well as oral testimonies of people who worked as forced laborers in Romania during this period. In the bigger picture, I'm trying to basically fill in a hole in the historiography of the Holocaust in Romania, as well as to provide another case for comparison in terms of the broader history of Jewish forced labor during the Holocaust; I actually think my results are pretty significant in the latter respect, as the system in Romania was organized similarly to the labor service system in Hungary, but the outcomes for the workers were very different. Please, interrogate further, I'm a total narcissist and love talking about my work.

This is completely irrelevant, but I love anhingas! They're one of my favorite waterbirds.

If anyone still takes Goldhagen seriously, I'm not aware of it.

In a very broad sense, I'm a lower-case "m" marxist and specifically within Holocaust studies, I'd consider myself a moderate functionalist. The people who I would closely align with (to keep the list brief) are Timothy Mason (approaching the war from an economic/political perspective), Raul Hilberg (the "original" functionalist, and the creator of the perpetrator/victim/bystander model), Christopher Browning (who's written some fantastic case studies as well as a great two-part history of the Final Solution), and, within my subfield, Radu Ioanid and Vladimir Solonari (who have approached the Romanian case from a more functionalist than intentionalist perspective).

I mean, I guess if OP wants people who are doing "traditional" stuff, I'm a pretty straightforward Marxist (this is what happens when you work with old Russianists for most of your career) and I've done most of my research squinting at a microform reader or translating from volumes of government documents. I did some oral history stuff too, so hopefully that's not too "social" or "non-traditional" for OP's tastes. In my field, basically every study has to account for the perpetrator/victim/bystander model that Hilberg used back in the early 60s, so I guess "traditional" political history is part of what I do, but that's the thing: it's part of it, not the entire project. This is the problem with OP's complaint. You can write a top-down political history or a description of strategy and tactics at the Second Battle of BFE all you want, but in almost any field, that's not a complete work anymore. I think someone previously mentioned the "so what?" factor; if you ignore the social implications of the politics, or the experiences of the soldiers fighting the Second Battle of BFE, then it isn't going to interest a serious academic audience because you haven't really answered the most important question: so what? (Actually, you probably haven't answered very much at all within the context of the historiography of your field either, but I digress.) Oh, and since OP seems to think there's some kind of witch hunt against straight white dudes in academia, I'm also a straight white dude.

Let's see...our department's website is in the lower decks of the failboat, so this is just off the top of my head: We have...5, not counting people who are there as part of the exchange program (since they're technically M.A. students). One each from Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands, and two from Mexico. Out of...15 total Ph.D. students (I lose track of the people who run out of funding, etc., and I'm not on campus to do a real head count...).

You could try to justify it as research funding and get some support either from your department or from your academic division that way, but I'm not sure if it would work, especially before you started the program. I used Title VIII to fund my intensive language courses, but that was for Romanian and I don't know if your intended language falls under Title VIII or not.

I would say something about how history is more relevant to the average non-academic as context for current socio-political events and that maybe more "academic" history texts ought to be marketed in that way, but then I realize that there are maybe about 10 people who care about my own research... I guess the rationale for Holocaust studies is a bit different though, as are the methodologies.

At this point, I'm banking on being able to say "hi, I'm 25 so you'll get 50 years out of me before I keel over in front of some poor freshmen" to win them over.