mvlchicago

That's where I am right now, outside of an obscene funding offer + guarantee of phd admission so long as I keep on track. Just wondering if there would be some *thing* that would make people change their mind (Yale buys you a personal library, gives you 40k/year with tuition waived, etc.) This is actually a really helpful thought. I'm definitely at least attending their visitation day, and speaking with a few faculty members. I think they'd still have to make an enormously strong case for it, but this definitely was an interesting perspective from which I'll think more .

Also, even if you're admitted to a school, sometimes your one POI leaves and then you're left holding the bag. That's incredibly awkward once you start investing time into your doctoral research.

. I have no clue what the workload looks like at MAPSS but there are a ton of employment opportunities on campus and Hyde Park itself isn't so expensive if you're willing to take on roommates. My living expenses any given month were somewhere around $800 with one of the more expensive apartment set-ups. Just a couple thoughts.

I am unsure if this is actually a decision to make, but I'm wondering if anyone had input as to what specifically a masters program would have to offer in order to take it over a Ph.D. Context: I have a Ph.D offer from Brown, and I'm speaking tomorrow with someone at Yale tomorrow about a Masters there + the funding they can allocate to me. I feel a 'lil bad if they're making massive amount of effort for me, and want to give them some consideration, but I honestly don't know what all they could give me to turn down Brown #crowdsourcing .

I'd actually also love some input on this; I've not to worry too much about bills right now, but I'm unsure as to how to take up a part time job when I'm going to be available for less than 6 months .

"To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable. The double entendre here is deliberate." Good old Clifford Geertz in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Daedalus, 1972. This isn't so weird as much as it is that I love how one of the most influential anthropology papers of the past 30 years has a penis joke in it.

Thanks y'all! as further info: they accepted 10 out of 180 applicants. So like, don't feel too bad if it didn't happen? Additionally, if you are on the waitlist now, I doubt I will take up a spot at Vanderbilt, so there's a better chance for the rest of you .

Just a heads up: I received a waitlist offer from Vanderbilt today. If you're still waiting to hear maybe not all hope is gone.

I'll give an answer since Telks and I may be colleagues next year . I'm currently standing with a Ph.D offer from Brown, a Funded Masters from Yale, A rejection in hand from Johns Hopkins, and presumable rejections from UPenn, NYU, Vanderbilt, UT Austin and Harvard. This is my second application cycle; I graduated from UChicago last year and was fairly certain I wanted to do a Ph.D for the specific questions I was asking, if nothing else. I had done my thesis in my third year so I could get at the Ph.D colloquiums and seminars offered during my fourth year. I applied using my B.A thesis to five schools: Yale, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Rutgers. I got rejected across the board, with Yale moving me into a Masters pool, before I got rejected there. I think there were a couple of things I needed to improve. First, one of my LoRs came from a big name in my field, but he was someone with whom I had taken one class–the fall of my fourth year–when he wrote for me. So, even though he was willing, I don't think it was the best letter I could've attained. I took a second class with him during the winter so he got to know my interests and my writing much much better over that period of time. Further, I got a fourth LoR from the Ph.D Seminar I took during my fourth year. So now I had three faculty members who knew my writing on a very close level, and a fourth letter from a large name in my methodological interests. Second, my writing sample: I mentioned I used my B.A. thesis. I didn't mention that rather than taking a section of it, I had tried to fit it into a 25 page sample. Bad idea. Bad. Bad. It was clunky and didn't really do much. The second cycle, I took 20 pages from the Ph.D seminar paper, and presented that at a conference, then used the feedback to re-work it. Third, I had never been abroad. I'm proposing to work broadly in 16th century Atlantic World Empires, specifically with the relation between colonial order, modes of Indigenous and African labor, and the development of identity politics. Having no experience with archives in Spain or France or in the Caribbean was marked as a red herring at a couple of schools. So I obtained funding and took a two month trip surveying the AGI and bibliotheque nationale in Spain and France respectively. A lot of this archival work (besides showing basic paleographic competency and language training with French/Spanish/Latin) helped make my case that I took my research seriously and was willing to engage all sorts of experiences to get it done. Plus this trip was awesome. Finally, I didn't have time to do this last cycle, but this cycle as I was reformatting my list I took time to meet every faculty member I wanted to meet. This was made easy by the fact that I lived on the East Coast and could travel reasonably well to each school. And I think if you can meet the faculty who'll be advocating you in that room, it makes the entire process much easier for them because they've got your face, and know you're engaged about what you want to do. I reworked my list a lot too, and made it a lil more open to my range of schools: Brown, Harvard, Yale, UPenn, NYU, Vanderbilt, UT Austin and Hopkins. Since I'm relatively young (I dunno about you, but I'm feelin' 22!), if I'd gotten rejected I would've seriously re-evaluated how important were the questions I'm asking: I would love a tenure track position, but given the current job market, I'm trying to look at this as an opportunity to expand my research horizons and interests in a lot of ideas that I like, and then use those interests in either mainstream publications, editorial positions, maybe work for NGOs etc. As such, what was driving me to do the Ph.D was my deep love of the historical circumstance and sources with which I was working. That being said I sort of put my life on hold this year in order to make this possible; and I don't know if I could've done another year like this hoping for admission. If I'd wanted to continue, it would've been more of the same. Aggressively pursuing funded masters and abroad masters programs (couldn't afford to do a standalone masters without funding); working faculty at varying schools I'd met at conferences and the like to learn about their thoughts on admissions. I'm also very isolated when it comes to sharing *my* written work, so I think I would've employed more people to read my stuff and give more advice. As it is, I'm incredibly lucky it came out as it did this time.

If anyone's waiting to hear on Yale's European Studies Masters program, I just received my decision. If they have a waitlist, I'm fairly certain I'll be passing it on.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest looking at a few historians of gender to get a sense of the sort of work that would be possible to satisfy the requirements of the women's studies program and show that you are serious about a commitment to history. Off the top of my head Joan Scott and Kathleen Brown could be good places to start; Scott's article "Gender: A Useful Category" especially has held a lot of influence in historical studies about gender.

I don't think it'll hurt your chances insofar as your women's studies MA focuses specifically on the history you've hinted at here. For example, a thesis about the role of women in a historical orientation would be indistinguishable from an MA history thesis to most Ph.D committees. Even if your thesis ends up more geared towards philosophy or the social sciences, if you can show how the work you've done will help situate the historical questions you ask, it should be fine.

CN: general discussion about the difficulties obtaining Tenure Track jobs in history. Upon my daily reading for the morning, I saw this recent article from Slate about the relationship between the name brand of your school and your ability to stand in the TT market. Normally I ignore these sort of analyses for all sorts of conflicting variable reasons, but what piqued my interest in this article was the fact that the researchers used history PhDs as a separate case study on its own (the full research article is here.) Basic finding: having a top tier degree has mattered more than ever in attaining tenure track jobs. Since this is a question against which many of us are or will be struggling, I was wondering what other people think about the methods they use for this sort of research and how that might influence choices for us. My couple of thoughts: it's incredibly difficult to these sort of analyses in fields like history since individual faculty members can be so key in specific fields. They use the example of someone moving from a PhD at Santa Cruz in Biology to a faculty position as Cornell, citing his advisor as a giant in the field. I feel like this has to be more common in the humanities–especially history–than in the hard sciences, since specificity is all the rage these days (my advisor in undergrad always said that coming out of a Ph.D, you should be the world's foremost expert in *Dissertation Title*.) Second, it's difficult to rank prestige insofar as those fields are so specialized. We spoke lots about military history, as an example, of a field that is in more niche zones than simple *prestigious schools.* Similar arguments could be made for say, Reformation history at Arizona after Heiko Oberman moved there. That being said, their analyses still seems to derive at least a correlation between top tier degrees and placement for history more generally. I'm having lots of conflicting thoughts about this article (and the data themselves are marvelous, really) so I thought I'd ask interested folks here on their thoughts. At what point should the name of your degree matter, and how would you (personally or generally) advise others to make decisions?

I've always been a fan of the tie-and-button-down look, even in casual settings, so I'm probably just adjusting my wardrobe to make that more the norm than was true in the past. I think one of the great freedoms of academia is that you don't *have* to change much of anything of how you look if it helps your work be awesome . And don't worry, my library is already in the process of large upgrades. Who says I don't need to own all the original Subaltern Studies volumes?

I'm irrationally excited to update/grade my wardrobe for next year. It feels like the cliché "new phase of life" sort of thing.

Looking for jobs is always good! I have good news but I still am looking for a part time or temp job .

?!? The Annales were primarily archival driven research, led by two historians. If your definition of history is set to exclude tax and crop records, I wonder what exactly you're trying to achieve.

I gotchu .

If the latter point is geared to me, there's a specific difference between saying that history should incorporate all elements that can demonstrate to their utilities to the larger project that is the historical discipline, and that this means all trends will be equally loved. Far from it. This whole "histories from below" discussion has only started about a century ago; if one takes a historical (heh heh) look at the situation, military, political and other modes of "traditional" history have long dominated the conversation since Gibbons started to futz with primary sources. That we're even considering military/political stories under the term "traditional" denotes specifically just how much power those narratives have had over the discipline. As many people have said on this thread, we're no longer in a period where the "fact gathering" is the dominant paradigm of historical inquiry. What's more the point is to figure out at what points collections of facts become narratives and how that relates to the transmission of information in particular contexts. That's been the goal of a number of projects that came out of the New Left (and hence, their intrinsic connection to the sort of political conceptions people to which they get nailed), and military history can certainly be part of that trajectory; it just needs to take a new mode of inquiry.

My entire point is that no field has a narrowly defined purview. What department are you thinking about that has maintained a rigorous hard line in the social sciences? And issues about funding are less ideological than they are about the fact that research–especially humanities research–is on a decline worldwide. Scott Walker in Wisconsin as an example, but one can also look at the broader context of the neoliberal era in regards to educational opportunities. Like, yes it absolutely sucks that we have to make decisions about what should or shouldn't be funded, but if you were given a history budget and the constraints of the real world, you'd probably end up funding those projects, which would help garner further funding in the future.

(I've only read one or two replies in this thread, please forgive me if I'm being repetitive. Also during undergrad I studied heavily under subaltern/postcolonial influence so I'm inevitably biased.) What exactly wrong with porous boundaries? You seem to be focusing on history in a vacuum when this is a question faced in most other humanities/social science disciplines. Philosophy's analytic side has sort of lost out to the continentals. English has been admitting entry to a number of digital aesthetics (humanities, video games, music.) Anthropology has expanded (since Geertz) beyond the typical dichotomies of European-Other. Economics has become incredibly porous in regards to rational choice and applications in basically every field ever since WWII. Even the hard sciences are trying to figure out where to place things like Biophysics or anthologies of climate change. Returning to "traditional" conceptions of history is unlikely to yield much relevance or utility to history moving forward. If military-political history is losing ground, it's probably because national narratives on a whole have become less useful when it comes to discussing the present and how we got here. That's not saying people shouldn't be studying it, but we're not exactly in a world where large battles and nationalist sentiment are driving much of the change. Are you expecting history to bracket itself off and continued losing any interest in being useful within the broader picture? The movement from structural-postructural, modern-postmodern, national-imperial orders isn't happening to frustrate "tradition." It's happening because there's a serious loss of coherency when one tries to explain, say, the late twentieth century movements within the Global South, or the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. Maybe traditional categories are going to play a role in the new explanations and ideas, but it seems a little silly to insist we need a specific definition of "history" without explicitly coming up with reasons why such specificity would be useful.

I don't think anyone here who's claimed a Brown acceptance is working on the Ancients . Sorry!

Congrats whoever got into UChicago's Div School! The environment there is honestly the warmest group of colleagues I've ever seen and the Div School Coffee Shop makes PB&J lattes, so I'd give that offer lots of consideration .