Harvard's History of American Civilization 2009

[GoodGuy]

Hey guys, Anyone heard anything from this program yet?

I heard from USC (denied) but not yet from the Am Studies programs I applied to at Brown, Yale, NYU or Harvard.

I hear NYU reports later than most, so I'm not even thinking about that response right now, but I heard that Harvard was starting to report.

Any news you have would be appreciated.

Thanks

GG

[earlyamerican]

According to gradcafe archives, I think the earliest anyone has heard back from Harvard Am Civ was Feb 20. Mostly it's been at least a week later than that, especially last year.

Harvard History seems to have reported, but not Am Civ.

[GoodGuy]

Thanks Earlyamerican

I'm so new here, I dIdn't know there WAS an archive here...It has dates of news from prior years? Gee, thanks!

GG

[earlyamerican]

Just search the results for "harvard american civilization" and you'll see previous years' results. You should also just search "harvard american" for all of them, as some people put "american studies" or variants in instead of am civ. You'll get history and African-American Studies results, but if you can make it through Harvard's shitty lack of application instructions, I'm sure you'll find what you need here.

[GoodGuy]

I saw that someone got rejected by Harvard History of Am Civ tonight on the results page, so I guess they're finally reporting.

I'm in the same HarvardYaleBrown matrix myself (with NYU thrown into the mix, but I hear they reply WAY late). A friend in Nashville said he heard that Brown was reporting in the next day or so. But who really knows?

I heard from USC's Am Studies early on--rejected.

A buddy of mine applied to Minnesota and Michigan as well as the matrix above but still hasn't heard from those places either.

I guess Am Studies (or Civ) is late all over the country this season, with USC the only real major exception?

Good luck to everyone!

GG

[earlyamerican]

Who just posted rejections?

I thought they were super uptight about not emailing notices. Were these both personal emails from professors? Unprompted, or did you email them?

For the love of whatever you hold dear, post what you know!

ETA I'm getting paranoid that some asshole is just messing with us.

[earlyamerican]

OK, double posting, pardon me. As of now, there are 142 views on this thread. Even I'm not neurotic enough to be driving up those kinds of views on a barely-active thread.

So. Either people are holding their cards awfully close to their chest, or we'll see it when the real notifications begin.

Um, please? Some of us are in crappy spots and trying to estimate the likelihood of needing to buy plane tickets, convince spouses that moving won't be the worst thing, etc. Advance notice is more than just an excuse to freak out.

[melancholyway]

I am also waiting to hear from Yale, Brown, NYU, and also GWU, BU, and Rutgers. I have been accepted by Michigan State and SUNY Buffalo.

I am relieved to see here that others have not heard either. I began to freak out when I noticed that one person in the results forum listing a wait list for NYU. Maybe there is still hope? Good luck to all fellow applicants.

[___]

I called the department at Harvard today and was told that the graduate committee was sending out notifications tonight or tomorrow. I'm not sure if this means acceptance phone calls have already been made.

[GoodGuy]

Got into Am Civ at Harvard today. Anyone else out there get in? Wanted to ask you a question or two...

GG

[GoodGuy]

i got into the history of am civ at harvard yesterday. i live close to cambridge, which i suppose explains why i was one of the first to know.

when did you hear from brown? i haven't heard yet.

i got into yale on thursday.

questions! go right ahead... i have a few myself.

Got the phone call from the department at Brown yesterday afternoon. Got the package from Harvard in the mail today. Haven't heard anything from Yale, so no idea what my status is there...Where do you think you'll end up? I should pick your brain about life in Cambridge in case I end up there. Still wanna hear back from NYU and Yale before I really make a decision. Was Yale a call? an email? a letter?

GG

[earlyamerican]

w00t.

[GoodGuy]

i received a phone call from yale on the 26th, and then the letter from harvard on the 27th. i'd still like to hear from brown, but i have a feeling i wasn't accepted.

but that is fine! yale was my top choice, and i'm pretty certain that i will go there. i do a lot with visual culture, and the chance to work with sally promey or laura wexler is a dream. though at harvard i could work with robin bernstein and jennifer roberts, which would be equally cool.

...

will you be going to the admitted student day at harvard? i'm going primarily because i do think that i need to give both harvard and yale consideration before making my decision. all things being equal, though, the stipend is going to go a lot further in new haven than in boston.

congrats to everybody! i think we've done a pretty good job this year from the look of our posts. early american? what's your news?

i think i'm the exact opposite of you! I got the call from Brown on the 27th, then the post from Harvard the next day, but nothing either way from Yale, call or email or post, so I figure I probably didn't make the cut.

I didn't have a clear-cut "top" choice, mainly because there are people at Berkeley, Brown, and Harvard that I'm excited to work with (some more than others, depending on the school, but you know what I mean.) Funny, I'm also VERY excited about working with Robin Bernstein--we had a nice email conversation back before I applied and it sounds like she'd be great to learn from.

I'm definitely going to Harvard and Brown's student days. I actually did my undergrad at Brown, so it will be nice to stop by again and see the old digs...I love the Am Civ program there, some very good people in popular culture and comparative race stuff, which is part of my project.

Maybe we'll meet in "real life" at Harvard's event? Let me gather my thoughts about living in Cambridge and I'll start to badger you!

Congrats to you, mm, and to everyone else!

GG

[kfed2020]

Harvard Am Civ is great, you guys. Congrats! It's really a quite rigorous and wonderful program, and students there seem happy, which doesn't always seem to be the norm in interdisciplinary programs given that 'interdisciplinary' comes with a degree of 'can't please everyone.'

And yeah, Bernstein is a sweetheart. Undergrads love her, too. Buuuut... be weary of growing attached to untenured faculty, should you come to Harvard. A fact of life here is simply that the vast majority of them won't be sticking around. Sucks, but so it goes.

[GoodGuy]

I'll look out for the Tattoo-ed One, and introduce myself, no doubt!

I agree about the students at Harvard Am Civ. All the guys I spoke to seemed very cool and inviting, patiently answering all my questions and offering some good insight. I felt very comfortable with them, as well as with the correspondence I made with profs Stauffer, Bernstein, Biel, and Sollors. I'd like to get to know some of the film faculty there as well. My project's sorta around public displays of desire and racialized masculinities in youth popular cultures.

Yeh, Fed, I have heard that about Harvard, the lack of tenure given to junior faculty. Why is it that way? Any ideas?

GG

[earlyamerican]

Places like Harvard, Stanford, etc., are notorious for not tenuring folks. They hire junior faculty (bottom of pay scale) to do a ton of grunt work then ditch them unless it's clear they're The Next Big Thing. They're sort of like a really bad boyfriend: won't commit because he thinks a hotter chick might come around. Unfortunately, the gendered dimension of this metaphor also carries over.

I guess it gets justified in that tons of places would love to hire someone formerly at Harvard, and plenty of junior faculty accept their job offer with no intention of going through the entire tenure process there. Instead, they make it through their initial review in order to make themselves prime commodities on the job market, and then take a cushy offer elsewhere.

[kfed2020]

The way I think of it is simply in terms of schools where one develops one's career and schools where one goes to die.

Fact is, Berkeley, Michigan etc. are schools where one goes to develop his/her career. They have higher appreciation for up-and-comers and are really a place where these junior faculty and thrive and produce their best work.

Harvard et al, on the other hand, are the places where one goes to die: after they've produced their best work, after they've risen to the top of their field. It's the place where you go to be eminent, because the status of the school works in your favor and, of course, your bad-assness works in the school's favor. Think about it: Summers, Mankiw, Pinsky, Vendler, Bhabha, the list goes on. "Tops of their fields."

Bernstein is great. But she's got to make some serious moves if she wants to stick around.

[GoodGuy]

I'm fairly sure Bernstein's getting tenure.

And I'll be glad to be there -- if I go -- working with her and Garber and Carpio and Sollors and Higginbotham...

[earlyamerican]

Oh, I need more coffee before posting on the internet.

So there were only FIVE admitted to Harvard's Am Civ. I thought Yale's 8 or 9 was bad! I'm deciding between Harvard and Berkeley. I'll be at Visit Day and I'm hoping you guys are fun and nice, since that is one tiny cohort.

[GoodGuy]

So there were only FIVE admitted to Harvard's Am Civ. I thought Yale's 8 or 9 was bad! I'm deciding between Harvard and Berkeley. I'll be at Visit Day and I'm hoping you guys are fun and nice, since that is one tiny cohort.

Same here, earlyamerican, Harvard and Berkeley--you going to the April 2nd event? Will be good to meet one of the other 4!

[earlyamerican]

so if three of us are on here, who are the other 2 i wonder?

Probably reading and thinking we sound like arrogant assholes. I feel like an asshole, anyway. Who gets in to something like this?

I'll be at Visit Day. I'm the mean old 2nd-wave-ish feminist. Actually, I'm so much fun that you won't think twice about chanting anti-patriarchy slogans with me at a dive bar at 2 in the morning. :wink:

[kfed2020]

kfed, i'm going to disagree with you. mostly because it is plain ol' sporting fun for me.

i'm not disagreeing with you regarding whether or not bernstein needs to "make some moves" if she wants to stick around. you've been at harvard, and clearly have some idea of what the situation is there. but harvard etc. seems a little bit... generalized. who are you including in your "harvard, etc.?" you can call me naive-- and i think you probably will-- but i firmly believe that as individual scholars working on our own, individual projects, what we might possibly contribute to our fields as individuals could-- just maybe-- wind up transcending the trajectory you outline in your sweeping generalization. becoming a lackey for some tenured professor whose career has "died" but who wants to hold onto her/his research and uses her/his graduate students to do so is one thing. yet i have to believe that the work i want to do is going to be embraced on some level, by some professor, at some "harvard, etc." school at least to the point where i might be able to make a name for myself. even if that "name" takes another ten years or more to develop.

i like you, kfed. i've read your posts with care, and feel at least familiar enough with them to know that *you're* in the know enough to have a pretty good picture of academe. but i'm also thinking that you seem a tad bit disgruntled for someone who is just beginning the journey the rest of us are also just beginning. can't you just give it a couple more years before you become seriously jaded?

m

Haha. I might be jaded... You might be right... You probably are. But, in a way, that's kind of what Harvard does to people, and that's maybe something anyone who wants to come here will need to learn for him/herself. I love it here; don't get me wrong. But I've seen too many brilliant professors get the boot for 'not being good enough,' and too many wonderful youngish (in academia-years) professors come from elsewhere and realize how much they dislike it here, for reasons that I'm beginning now to understand as I think more about my own life in this profession.

The fact is -- and it's true, and it's known: Harvard is not the place to be a rising young star. That's not how this school works. Other schools nurture, develop, etc.; Harvard steals. The big names rarely started here. They were poached. And they're often traditional; if they're not, they're just remarkably bad-ass, but what academic culture deems "bad-ass" seems, on the whole, to be fairly prescribed and predictable, to me. And whom Harvard steals is very much dependent upon what those people do as well as how well they do it. Don't hold your breath for the English department to ever hire someone in Performance Studies -- even if Princeton, among others, finds it completely legitimate. See how many classes in Latino/a studies we have here, across the entirety of the college/grad school. You can count them on one hand. We don't even have a specialist in the Romance Languages dept. Did you notice, by the way, that our women/gender/sexualities division is not a department, but a 'committee'? Ask English undergrads how hard it'd be for them to get a film class to count towards their requirements, while you're at it. Hell, I'm the only undergraduate in Comparative Literature who's an African Americanist; I'm the only one who even remotely bothers with queer genres, as well. In Comp Lit! FYI, there's also only one Prof in the English department who's even willing to teach a queer class, and he hasn't gotten tenure yet, so check in again in 5 years to see if he's still around.

etc.

The fact is, many of us /will/ do great work -- and many of us /will/ be marginalized by schools like Harvard. I say "etc" because I think we need to figure out for ourselves which schools belong to this category; even among the Ivies, it varies. There's a reason I didn't apply to English here. There's a reason I didn't even study English as an undergraduate. Luckily, Harvard isn't the be-all end-all of rational academic decision-making. But I do think it's reflective of a particular type of academic culture that I -- being someone into performance studies, queer genres, etc. -- plan to avoid like the plague. Who would my colleagues be? Who would support my work?

I think Am Civ is a different kind of department, in that it's interdisciplinary by nature and you can make it work for yourself. And the Harvard name will carry you far. But don't -- if you do interesting, edgy things and want great institutional support and an actual chance at tenure -- try to teach here.

[GoodGuy]

Hey KFed--Who's the prof in English doing queer stuff? Curious...

And do you know where you'll end up in September? DId you work with Salamisha Tillet at all? She seems really bright and progressive...and at Penn now.

[earlyamerican]

Hey kfed, that's good institutional knowledge, and I appreciate you sharing it with us.

[kfed2020]

But of course! I'd also like the emphasize that most of my gripes are with professor life here. Being a student has its ups and downs, in terms of doing progressive work. Salamishah Tillet [who, oddly enough, I'll be meeting for the first time in a couple weeks] does amazing work and is fairly progressive, you're right. There's also a new jr. prof at Berkeley, Namwali Serpell, who does progressive work and is amazing, as well. And then there's me, and I"m the only undergrad doing Performance Studies work at the college that I know of; there's one grad student in the Af Am department doing it. I'd like to think I'm doing fairly progressive stuff, but I'll have to study at a more progressive place to be sure.

We all 4 of us had/have the same adviser. That should suggest that it's possible to be edgy here, but that the faculty who're useful in that regard might be limited. Robin Bernstein qualifies, obviously, and so does our adviser Glenda Carpio (love her!)

I also don't want to give the impression that Harvard is not a wonderful place. I suspect that no matter what you study you'll do GREAT work if you have the potential, same as anyone else at any other school -- Because there are some really important faculty who're important for a reason, and if you're someone like me who thinks that sometimes interdisciplinary scholars seem a little lacking on the disciplinary training, going to a school that appreciates disciplinarity might prove beneficial. It has for me. I've gotten wonderful training in literary theory and American history that has proven SO beneficial. If you're interdisciplinary, you'll be such no matter where you go; there's perhaps something to be said for putting the accountability on yourself to do this while the school offers you the structure and canonical training that you need. I don't know.

No, I haven't made up my mind about where I'm going. Not officially... Have any of you? I need to turn in my thesis before I start thinking about my *future*.

The English prof who toys with queer genres, btw, is Matt Kaiser. He's amazing. Not only is he incredibly smart and a talented instructor (he's managed to make a Victorian Lit class THE MOST POPULAR class on campus this semester. Whoa) he's also, 1) charismatic, 2) well-dressed, 3) hott. Lord.