meo03

well for what it's worth, there are others on this forum still waiting to hear from SC as well. US to 1877 is my field as well- though I was admitted as an MA student. Who did you apply to work with? I mentioned Ford and Smith in my letter there, as my research focus is on slavery and politics in the upper south.

that does seem a bit late. I heard back from SC mid Feb, but it looks like you are applying to the public history program, so I suppose they are on a different schedule. Regardless, hope you do get word sooner than April.

more or less. Waiting on both UNC and UGa, but really only waiting on UGa-- UNC would be a lovely surprise, but certainly not expecting it.

Hah, no worries! I knew when I posted it was ambiguous. Got my rejection to UVa today. Still waiting to hear from Smurf Village!

to be fair, they don't have that reputable of a program. Very little funding.

Harbinger of things to come? I am forcing myself to get out of the house and away from this site and my email for a while!

congrats on the funded offer. Athens is a really cool town, should you end up going that route. Good luck on the rest of your impending news!

Indeed. Far too reasonable. Bordering dangerously on fair-minded and balanced. All the things I stand against, and vociferously oppose.

reading the tea leaves from the past couple of years... seems they have sent out their acceptances on a Friday, and their rejections early the following week. Two years running is hardly a pattern worth writing home about though. Still, since I have Friday off work, it will be a struggle not to sit around and refresh my email and the website.

Nice. What's your field? I'm into southern political and social and applied to work with Inscoe. Good luck with Georgia, and the others.

I'm still waiting for my official Emory rejection, and from UVa (probably very soon) ,UNC and UGa (probably next month). I'm not really expecting UVa or UNC to come out in my favor, but would naturally be thrilled if they did. I applied to the PhD program at Georgia, but expect to be offered admission to the MA program there instead. Seems quite likely I will be going the MA route this cycle-- which is fine by me. I have lived in my last two locations for stints of two years, and I like a good pattern. Anyone else here apply to UGa?

I called the Graduate School and not the dept, so I didn't even ask. I assumed they would just refer me to the history dept.

Had a minor heart attack this morning when I went to check my status. When I logged into the website, it told me my application was unsubmitted, and none of my info was there- SOP, letters of recommendation, writing sample- all gone! Called the GSAS admissions office and apparently I had created two profiles, one that was complete and one clearly not. She deleted the blank one, and now I can see the real one again.... long story short, still waiting for a decision, but that certainly woke me up nice and good today.

well, got my vandy rejection. Oh well, on to the next one!

congrats on the good news!

in previous years they seem to send out acceptances in late Feb. I am particularly nervous about this one. Both because Vandy really matches my interests well, and sentimentally, as my grandfather (who is in my avatar pic) got his PhD. there in the 30's. His dissertation director was Frank Owsley, by the way.

based on the past two years, UVa may send out acceptances tomorrow. Speculative? yes. Am I probably going to lose sleep due to said speculation? Of course.

I got accepted there today as well. I applied there for the MA program, and got awarded an assistantship with a nice stipend for two years.I haven't checked the website, but got an email from the DGS this afternoon. I'm very excited, there are a couple of people there that I will be thrilled to work with, should I go there.

thanks! I've never been to Lexington, but randomly, I work with 3 native Kentuckians who lived in Lexington for a time. They have good things to say about the city, and my advisers have had good things to say about the faculty there. Nice to hear something positive.

first admit came this morning, from my fallback school, UKentucky! Nice to have some positive news, really changes the dynamic of the waiting game.

yeah, we're in the same boat here on Emory, and based on the past couple of years they send out their rejections much later than their acceptances. I really wanted Emory, ah well. No need to be dejected yet though! Still plenty of places to hear back from.

well, duke rejection letter just came by email. Standard letter, this one from the dean. Oh well, that one was a long shot for me. Bring on the next one..

I agree, but I think that that is only one half of the story. There is absolutely a collaborative effort to history; despite the fact that history is massively competitive, both in terms of our competition within the academy, and the competition and power struggles of the past that we historians seek to describe and explain. Scholarly efforts do tend to build on each other, even in revision. I think it cuts both ways, and no question-- not even this one-- ever gets settled for long. Consensuses are arrived at, and torn down, for myriad reasons. But the human element is ever present, and should never be discounted, in historiography, in dealing with the application process, in dealing with our colleagues, on this message board, ect. and ad infinitum. And I rather enjoy the irony that I am somewhat, though not entirely, disagreeing with you on this point.

I can get on board with this. I had a recent conversation about how bizarre it is that people would argue in favor of post-modernism. By most renderings, it should be both self-evident, and not something which needs be proselytized. Even extreme Post-modernism-- the death of the Real, the ultimate primacy of perspective and subjectivity, and even the ultimate inaccessibility of [T]ruth-- doesn't necessarily keep historians from embarking on a search for meaning. Or at least in my opinion. Granted, if the result is to fall into fatalism and a sense of meaninglessness, that poses a lot of very basic problems to being an historian. Hell, it poses questions about getting out of bed and being human. My tentative solution is the same that I have for the free will/ determinism debate of philosophy: I "feel" as if I can know things/ that things have meaning/ that I have some degree of free will and agency, therefore I act on that feeling, and attempt to sort of what that means starting with some degree of presupposition. I don't think that a feeling of free will or of meaning is a coup de grace in favor of it being the case, or even less, as a Truth or a demonstrable fact, but I do think that there is probably some utility in having that feeling. Also, this whole line of thought makes me think of this:

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on this. For my part, I think the very nature of post-modernism-- its hyper-relativity and subjectivity-- runs contrary to any sort of united ideology that can die, per se. On the other hand, I see elements of post-modernist thinking as very useful to the historian. What I expect, and hope for, is a move away from the hysterics and polemics that arose from the post-modern challenge. Post-modernist theory doesn't threaten to be the "death of History" or anything of the sort-- any more than Quantitative, "Scientific", Feminist, Social, Cultural, Anthropological or Linguistic theories have. It does, I think-- as all of the turns to other theoretical approaches-- present a challenge to how we understand the past, and how we disseminate that understanding, and bring to the fore underlying questions of why we do history, both as individuals and collectively. What will almost certainly be the case, I think, is that whatever the intentions may have been, particularly extreme post-modernist thinkers -- their methodologies, and the sorts of problems they raise about the project of History will be useful to add nuance to the models that historians use. In short, I see post-modernist theories to be, ultimately, just more tools in the analytic tool-shed.