thoughts about graduate school
Should I Go to Graduate School?
First of all, you should give lengthy consideration to the question of whether you should go to graduate school at all. Tim Burke, a historian at Swarthmore College, has reflected seriously on this question and his reflections may be found here. But be forewarned: to the question “Should I go to graduate school?” his “short answer” is No. Which I think is the right answer. Another equally helpful, and perhaps equally discouraging, essay may be found here.
More specifically: people often ask me about what the best options are for Christians who want to attend graduate school in English. And that’s a more complicated issue, though not one with a more appealing resolution.
I think the first thing that needs to be said is that there simply aren’t any graduate programs in English that emphasize, or allow a student to emphasize, the relations between literature and Christianity. The only program that even comes close to this is at Baylor, and even there you find considerable disagreement about what sort of relationship between literature and Christianity is appropriate.
There are a handful of “religion and literature” programs around the country, most notably at the University of Chicago. There used to be a strong one at the University of Virginia, but it seems to be moribund; and in any case such programs are positioned uncomfortably, being not-quite-literary-studies and not-quite-religious-studies.
Of course, one can find a number of serious Christians teaching in various places around the country, but there aren’t too many of them. Most of the Christians I know in English studies are pretty shy about announcing their beliefs (and therefore I will not name them here) and tend not to think out loud about the relationship between their faith and their professional work. Christians in English have been much less successful at establishing a significant public presence than our colleagues in history and philosophy, alas. And in any case, I am not sure it’s wise to pick a graduate school on the basis of a single Christian scholar, no matter how brilliant that person might be. People go on sabbatical, or extended leave, or they change jobs; even if they stay around you might not get along with them as well as you’d like. There are just too many imponderables.
I know all this sounds like bad news, and in a way it is. But really, it just means that anyone interested in forging connections between Christianity and literary study is going to have to do it on his or her own, by reading and thinking and writing, rather than by taking classes and being mentored. That’s certainly the way I did it, and in the end I found a very good dissertation advisor, Daniel Albright, who though not a Christian (as far as I know) nevertheless respected my interests and was very helpful to me in developing my writing and thinking. In the end, whether you find a Christian professor to serve as your mentor is almost certainly less important than whether you find a supportive church community and a stimulating overall graduate program that makes you a better scholar.
But If I DO Go . . . ?
Okay.
1) Think about where you would like to live. There are many, many graduate programs in this country and abroad that can offer you a fine education. But they are in widely varying locations: some in warm climates, some in cold; some in large cities, some in small towns, some even in rural environments. Since, even in graduate school, you have a life beyond studying, you should spend a good deal of time thinking about what sort of environment you believe you would thrive in. You may end up in a first-rate graduate program that offered you no end of intellectual thrills and challenges, but if that university is located in a town you hate, with a climate that oppresses you, you probably won’t enjoy your graduate school years very much.
2) The most imporant information you can get about an English department is the description of courses offered in a given semester. For instance, from the Notre Dame English Department website:
ENGL 90610 - Fictions of the Public Sphere in U.S. Literature and Culture - Glenn Hendler
Using and critiquing concepts of the public sphere from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as from recent critical theory and cultural studies scholarship, this course will explore the history of the gendered and racialized distinctions between public and private, domesticity and the market, reason and sentimentality in U.S. literature and culture before 1900. Several historical problems will structure our theoretical, critical, and literary readings, including: the development of domestic ideology; the rise of social movements such as temperance, feminism, and abolition; and the role of popular literary forms in the development and critique of both working-class politics and imperialist ideology. Central issues in many of our readings will be the politics of represented emotion, especially the key sentimental concept of sympathy, and the varying ways in which the reading and writing of literature were meant to prepare potential citizens – especially boys and men – for participation in politics, economic exchange, and civil society.
Does this interest you? Are other course offerings similar in tone, in approach, in the kinds of readings they assign? A less-prestigious program that features courses you’re really interested in taking may well be a better fit for you than a top-ten program that offers course that bore or annoy you.
3) Consider the size of the department: smaller departments, with fewer students, can be more intimate and often build more community; on the other hand, they will offer you fewer choices of courses and advisors, and therefore can sometimes be hard to fit into. Conversely, the larger departments give you lots of choices, and increase the chance that you’ll find an advisor who understands and supports your interests; but their size can make them feel impersonal, and some students in them feel neglected.
4) You should try to find out about churches and Christian community in a given area. A lack of meaningful community outside the academy can be just as oppressive as a miserable climate.