Pre-Application Program Research UK vs US

[Banstaraí]

Hi everyone,

So I'm a sophomore History/ Anthropology double major at W&M and am planning on attending grad school (clearly). I've been researching various programs for some time, but there was a piece of advice I got from a doctoral candidate at GW that's making me a little nervous. I'd asked her about the marketability of a DPhil from Oxbridge over here in the US, and she more or less told me that the DPhil is great-- so long as you want to live in Europe for the rest of your career: if I want to work in the US, the lack of teaching/publishing experience at the UK and Irish schools is going to cripple my job prospects in an already highly competitive academic market.

I wasn't entirely happy with this pronouncement as all my top programs choices and POIs had been in the UK/Ireland, but I started my research over again, with less-than-satisfactory results in the US programs.

To clarify, my subfield is Modern Irish History (particularly 1913-1923; no interest in the famine era. whatsoever), though I have some side interests in Ancient Ireland, the Ancient Celts, Celtic Folklore, the Irish Rebel Ballad Tradition, etc.

Anyways, the US programs for my subfield are few and far between, and most US-based Irish historians are Famine-centric, which would likely grate on my nerves a bit. I really like Harvard's Celtic Languages and Literatures department, but I'm just worried about losing the flexibility/marketability that comes with a history PhD, rather than the Celtic Lang/Lit. PhD. And Boston College has a fairly decent program too, though they shy away from the Ancient stuff. Essentially, while there are programs for what I'm interested in, there aren't really all that many POIs that I'd jump to work with at these places, or I simply don't fit their interests (ie if I did History with a secondary field of Celtic Lang/Lit at Harvard, I'd be working with a Britainist and it would be like my current undergrad research experiences all over again...) Whereas Oxbridge is filled with names I recognize from books and articles I was impressed with and a wealth of different programs.

Any thoughts on any of this?