lyonessrampant

Based on what you've written, I think you'll have much better luck going the funded MA route and then applying after. Your research interests, for example, sound very broad. You're combining romance, Shakespearean drama, Spenser, and medieval texts. Each of those areas is huge and complex. Interdisciplinary work is great, but it takes a lot more specialization to do it well. An MA will give you time and space to think about how to hone and focus your research interests. Even if you do end up doing a dissertation that is interdisciplinary or spans so many texts, you want your research statement in an application to be focused and specific because it shows you can develop a do-able research project. A funded MA is no guarantee of acceptance at a top 10-15. Some of those programs tend to favor applicants direct from BA, but those direct-from-BA acceptances usually go to people from top public or private schools. I went to a tiny liberal arts college and applied to top programs and ended up doing a partially funded MA at UChicago. I learned a ton and am a much better scholar and researcher, but I would never do it again if I could. Substantial debt for a humanities graduate degree is a terrible idea. There are, however, great schools outside of the top 10-15-20. My university is one of those. We have multiple research centers, excellent funding, and great archival collections. Research the programs to match your interests to their strengths rather than selecting where to apply based on the USNWR (or whatever) rankings list. You'll be happier and do better work at a place where you and your research fits. Best of luck.

Ah! I see. I think having some exposition of the novel can't hurt, especially if it is not a well-known novel. Good luck!

Are you asking if you should revise it or not? If that's what you're asking, really any paper can use a good revision and polish before submission. I'd start with the professor's comments and go from there. Are you engaging with recent (last year or two) scholarship? If not, update that to make sure that your argument doesn't reproduce what other people have said.

CUNY doesn't have funding problems exactly. They bumped their stipend, which used to be super low given living costs in New York, but it is a large state school so the increased cost for an international student could be a factor. Definitely still apply because it's a great school. I'm pretty far away from your interests, so I think someone who works in your subfield would be able to give you much better program recommendations than me.

They're all great programs, but GWU often has funding issues so that might be an issue there. I'd say still apply if you can afford it. CUNY's funding situation has improved recently, but they've also had funding issues the last few years. Again, great school so definitely apply, and there are fantastic people there. Being in New York also offers tons of resources. Best wishes!

If you choose Italian (and this goes for anyone needing a language basically besides French, Spanish, and German) look into the Foreign Language Area Studies program through the Department of Education. The FLAS supports either full-year study at your home institution or intensive summer programs that you can do in country. I was lucky enough to get the summer fellowship twice, and let me tell you, spending a couple summers in Italy is a pretty nice way to spend a good chunk of the summer! Immersion is also obviously the best way to learn a language, but the food might even trump the whole language-learning thing

Best of luck to all starting this semester! Adjusting to the reading load can be challenging. As someone who took up to 25 credits a semester in undergrad (including classes like Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Calculus, etc.) I thought I wouldn't have any issue with taking four courses during my Ph.D. I almost died (also taking an off campus Italian class and a very part-time job, but basically, it was a terrible idea). Don't push yourself too hard. Challenge yourself but make time for your health, family, and relaxation. Work hard but take care of yourself, too. Best wishes to all! And WT: If you continue to focus on lyric (specifically English EM sonnets,) I'd recommend Italian. You can pick up Latin pretty easily after if needed, but Italian will be much more helpful if you pretty much stay in the 16th c. and pretty much all the important English sonnet writers knew and interacted with Italian sonnets.

I think that narrative needs to be part of your SOP, though less about a personal story and more about an organizing structure that links the four parts of the SOP that you've identified (which sound good to me). The archival focus really makes you an interesting candidate because you have experience working with archives, and, if you're applying to any comp lit programs, that will be a nice advantage. As far as applying to US schools as an international student, search this forum and you'll find some threads on that subject that list schools who seem to consistently accept international students (my university is one of them). Generally, private universities have more international students because they don't have to manage the extra expense of an international student like public universities. Good luck!

I'm not on here often, but I just wanted to jump back in and say that while I am aware that Chicago says you don't need an apostrophe to form plural of capital letters (which explains Telkanuru's commitment to pull a Braveheart on his/her hill . . . historian, no?), other stylistic manuals do require it. All of this indicates, as the rhet/comp people have so well described, the variability inherent in language, which is why fairly arbitrary insistence about disputed grammar points isn't particularly productive, largely because the hill one is willing to die on may well shift with the next edition of whatever style manual is used, leaving the dedicated combatant without grand. Does grammar matter? Sure. Do lots of obvious grammar errors and circuitous sentences distract from the clarity of both sentence and argument? Sure. At the same time, an intensive focus on grammar similarly obscures the clarity of either sentence or argument. Losing the forest for the trees and all that.

I think there is a lot of good advice in this thread, and instead of echoing the parts I think are most useful, I'm just going to point out one little grammar thing since Telkanuru brought it up (I'm in an English Ph.D. so please forgive the pedantry). The plural of letters and numbers can/should be indicated with an apostrophe, so B's is correct. I could point you to several textbook-type sources, but for ease, here's a user-friendly Oxford Dictionaries link (go to the bottom of the page): http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/apostrophe. Back on topic, best of luck to Francophile1 on whatever you decide. Perhaps take a look also at Gregory Semenza's chapter on writing a seminar paper in Graduate Study for the 21st century, and there are also entries on writing at Vitae and in the Chronicle. I'd recommend doing a search for writing advice at those websites.

Neither strictly a medievalist nor a historian (15th/16th c. diss topic), but I've taken history seminars and have a very interdisciplinary project (one heavily influenced by history), and I definitely recommend taking the history methods seminar and doing it out of the gate. Getting the methods down will help you develop your project more organically over the period of your coursework. Also, this (at least at my university) is the kind of class that draws from several disciplines, so you probably won't be the sole lit person (as telkanuru pointed out). Best of luck!

You might look into University of Minnesota. Mary Franklin-Brown in the French department is a fantastic medievalist, and the Center for Medieval Studies and Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World provide tons of opportunities (and funding) for interdisciplinary medieval work.

Definitely seconding everyone on UMass. Also, look into Foreign Language Area Studies fellowships once you're at UMass (if you go there). They are funded by the DoE and cover language study for less commonly taught languages. You could use them to go spend summers in Slavic countries focusing on language study and squeeze in some research, too. I did 7 weeks last summer and 6 the summer before in Italy. This is a great way to develop/maintain language focus, and you can probably still incorporate Slavic studies into your dissertation; you'll just have to be the language expert and do your research on scholarship knowing that your committee can give you intelligent feedback on your ideas but won't know the field well.

Yay WT! Congratulations!!!! So happy for you

Course offerings are important. Do make sure to look in departments besides just English, too. Most programs require you to take some courses outside the department and to have someone on your committee from outside the department. Taking courses outside English is a good way of finding that committee member.

I'll add Minnesota English to the already mentioned CSCD program, very welcoming of interdisciplinary work, lots of people who work with theory and non-textual artifacts in addition to "low" culture texts. Maybe also take a look at Oregon and Utah for programs that are strong and outside of the top 30. I also second the advice to start your application with your writing sample. Let that guide your SOP. The better the fit between those two documents the stronger you'll be as an applicant. Your WS should be relevant to existing conversations in the field, so make sure to be reading recent scholarship, and it should show you doing the kind of work your SOP says you're interested in doing, so if theory is important, your WS should show you working with it in productive and relevant (read recent) ways. So much of applying is selling yourself as a candidate, so to that end, you focus what you say your interests are. You can always explore more things or even change subfields entirely once you're in a program. They expect that you'll change, but they want to see from your application materials that you know how to present yourself as a (developing) scholar.

It depends on the program. If I were you, I'd email and ask how the waitlist works at any program where you are waitlisted. Lots of programs only accept the number of people they have spots for so that as soon as an accepted person declines they go to the waitlist. There are, however, some programs that do operate the way your MA program does, so definitely ask!

If it isn't funded, I'd say it is a cash cow program. Or even if there are funded offers but you don't get one, I still wouldn't do it, especially since you have some funding elsewhere.

Having an MA in humanities isn't an obstacle to being accepted to a lit Ph.D. program. My MA was in the humanities at another cash cow rep program (UChicago. . .though with a partial tuition scholarship). There is a guy here in my program who did the humanities MA at NYU. Basically, an MA in humanities isn't going to keep you out of a Ph.D. program. It sounds like you have some pretty terrible relationships with profs from your MA program, though, so that may be an obstacle in terms of getting strong LORs. However, rather than doing another MA, you might instead audit graduate courses at a university in your area to develop new writing samples, LOR contacts, and refined research interests.

Being able to teach stand-alone lit classes is a huge advantage. At my University, we teach stand-alone lit courses during years 4-6, so with a couple summer courses, we go on the market having taught between 4 (if on fellowship one of the last two years)-8 courses (some repeats but a lot of diversity, too) in addition to teaching stand-alone composition courses where we can design our own syllabus. At a 1-1 load, that was a huge draw for me personally. Being able to teach in your area really does help spawn ideas for your own research.

Maybe something from the school you will be attending? Coffee mug or bookmark or something small?

Well, if your POI isn't on the adcom and doesn't have control over the waitlist, I'd contact the DGS. If you can't speak specifically about the DGS's research, you should talk about the program and things unique to the university that align with your research (Centers or Consortiums for example).

Hi empressMarmot, I understand feeling paranoid, and there are some horror stories of this happening (particularly during the worst of the recession at some of the California schools), but they are super rare and you would cause for legal action if you were meeting all requirements of the program for degree progress.

Your CV would show any fellowships or funds awarded as well as any teaching experience, which provides financial support. If you have an MA but don't list fellowships or teaching a Ph.D. adcom will know that you paid for it. Like InHac said, you especially want to call attention to any funding support that was competitive. You should put any kind of money given you on your CV (travel grants, research funds, fellowships of any size, etc.).

Hi wetheplants, if you had a full-tuition remission from UC's MAPH, I would recommend it because loans to live cheaply in Chicago for 9 months wouldn't be too much for you or a high cost for your parents. You have to be highly self-directed with a pretty clear sense of what you want out of MAPH to get the most out of it. I drafted my MA thesis the summer before starting and spent the year workshoping it with a writing director and forming a strong, early connection with the professor I wanted to direct my thesis. It went through several revisions over the year and improved significantly, but it was a much stronger piece of writing by the end of the year because I started so early (and became my first publication). I went to all of the offered reading groups and events in my area and contacted professors in office hours and by email to try to create strong relationships. I took time off after the MA for my partner to finish law school and maintained those links for a few years after finishing. All of my LORs when I applied to Ph.D. programs came from them, but I bet those relationships would have been even stronger in a two-year program, and I bet that I would have been more competitive applying during the second year of a program rather than two years after finishing an MA and having time away. Basically, UC is an amazing place with great resources, scholars, and support (for their Ph.D.s). As far as Oxbridge goes, the job prospects in the UK are even more dismal than here in many ways. Add in protectionism in the US that disincentivizes hiring from outside the US system and it just seems to make sense to do the Ph.D. in the US if you want to teach here. The fact that you don't get much (if any) teaching experience is a disadvantage, and the fact that the UK education system at both the undergraduate and graduate levels functions so much differently than the one in the US means you could have challenges being a strong mentor and advisor as a prof here. I did a study abroad in the UK, too. It's great. Oxbridge is awesome, and if you can get in there and funded for a Ph.D., you may well be able to get around the protectionism in the US that privileges US degrees. However, once in a Ph.D. program, there are research resources to go work with archives or at sites (if you get into med/ren drama that focuses on space and/or actual performance) and you could do a Fulbright or post-doc there. This would let you get the experience with an American degree that would make you even more competitive in the US. As for placements, you have to explicitly ask programs because many don't advertise that information for the MA (or the Ph.D. for that matter). It's not just enough to ask where they've placed MA students in Ph.D. programs. Ask what an average cohort size is, the approximate percentage who apply to Ph.D. programs, and the percentage of those who applied who get in and where they got in. Some programs don't have complete data about this, but many do and are reluctant to share. The more forthcoming a program is in response to those type of questions is a likely indicator of a strong MA program.