oscarwildebeest

Nailed it. Also, replace "of comparative politics" with "of any subfield", "regional subfield of interest" with "area of interest" - now you've got good advice for anybody, regardless of subfield.

Oh, calm down, you. No one here is any position to do more than speculate. They may well be done with our kind, or they may be admitting several more. Unfortunately, they don't seem real keen on notifying their rejects, so you and I and ours just have to decide how long we want to keep our fingers crossed.

And I'm hoping they've still got a little bit'a theory love left in'em.

Hey Plisar, what's your subfield? I was trying to guess from the programs you applied to but I couldn't figure it. Also, tough breaks on Duke - but you've got more than a few stellar choices as is, and many admits to come I'm sure.

Can anyone offer any advice on what this area is like for queer / LGBT - identified folks? Based on your own or your friends experiences, would you say this an LGBT friendly place? Is there any sort of non-straight dating scene?

Well, I can only speculate. But here's something I do know: their Campus Visit is scheduled for March 1-3, and the RSVP deadline on that is Feb. 19th. Based on that, I'd say it's unlikely they'll be accepting many more applicants. They might make a few more offers in the next couple days, though.

Have you looked at the Interdisciplinary Cluster initiative at Northwestern? That's one of the most appealing aspects of their program for me. One of the "clusters" is in Critical Theory, and you'd be able to work outside the Poli Sci department by pursuing that option. Based on that, and the points above, I think you should only pick Minnesota if there are some faculty affiliated with the CSDS program who you know you would like to work with. Being able to design your own course of study is quite an attractive option, but if you end up working on a dissertation that is too difficult to find advisors for, the quality will surely suffer.

I want to study the relationship between ontology and politics. Specifically, how social and political structures both presuppose and shape particular conceptions of identity and moral worth, and what that means for politics and ethics. I'm especially interested in how societies develop relatively inclusive or exclusive self-conceptions, the kind of expansion and recession of the boundaries of moral community. My influences here: Arendt, Anderson, Foucault, Taylor, Rorty. I should probably read Hegel and Heidegger, someday. Other thinks I like to read and write on: theories of injustice, moral psychology, humanism, cosmopolitanism, 20th century political thought. Right now I'm writing my senior thesis. It's about Reinhold Niebuhr and Judith Shklar, their critiques of liberalism from a moral-psychological standpoint, and the possibility of reconciling transformative politics with their criticisms.