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[hegemony]

That's right, a medievalist from Toronto probably won't be in the running for jobs below an R1.  That's also true of a medievalist from the English Department at Yale or Harvard.  On the other hand, if you want a good chance of a job as a medievalist at an R1, I wouldn't choose an English Department at a medium-level university, because all the jobs will be going to people with Medieval Studies degrees from places like Toronto.

[janewales]

Most English departments are not seeking an expert in Latin, manuscript studies, multiple medieval languages, etc. 

You're right about this, snowbound, and it's why I've been careful to state throughout this thread that my own experience is at a research university.

However, looking at this year's medieval advertisements for English, I can see that many different types of institutions say they are looking for a medievalist who can effectively cover both Old and Middle English, as well history of the language. This latter requirement in particular isn't negligible-- the ability to teach the history course properly would usually be connected to advanced, technical training.

In other words, there are non-research positions being advertised right now, whose requirements would not be easily filled by someone without the kind of training you seem to think would be necessary only for research-oriented positions. That training might come via a medieval studies program, or via a high-end single-discipline program, but the point is that what to a non-medievalist might seem esoteric (philology, paleography, linguistics, manuscript studies etc) is often in fact central to ANY future teaching in the field, and some of the skills are more readily acquired in "studies" programs.

Your advice to the OP's friend about making a choice of field, however, is spot on. I would never advise anyone to enter any program (interdisciplinary or otherwise) without a pretty clear sense of where s/he hoped to be, 5-10 years down the road.

[historical_charisma]

To add an insider's and a historian's perspective, I'm a Medieval Studies alumna from Toronto and I now have a position at a history department at a Canadian R1.  My dissertation topic was more historical than it was any other discipline, and I had TAed survey courses in history while in the program.

[academic_cog]

And I have to agree that I think this whole field is disappearing... my dissertating buddy did medieval stuff and a couple years ago there were *7* total medieval jobs in English on the MLA list. When she finally got a VAP, they were thinking about converting it into a TT to replace the dude who retired, and they did a study of small liberal arts colleges in the area and decided that, since none of them covered anything medieval anymore, the line was better allocated to health sciences or something like that.

What year was this? For the past several years there have been 20+ tt jobs per year in medieval English lit. This year, the wiki lists 26 (although there are some that require particular sub-specialties and/or are above the assistant prof level).

Let's see; I was done, so ... 2009? We had more medieval lit. specialists going on the market than there were job listings in the entire MLA list. That's all they talked about at the dept's MLA party that year. The year before was the "magic year" that there were as many as 45 jobs, but none of our people got anything then.

Let's not forget that this discussion started because R-F Dawn believed that a Med. Studies degree would make her friend competitive not simply in English, but in English AND History AND Art History AND Classics.  So the plan doesn't seem to be for said friend to focus on literature to anything like the extent we're talking about here. 

THIS. This is the point I was trying to make. A medieval studies lit specialist in one of these interdisciplinary programs can't realistically apply for those *other* departments. You do a lit diss and TA the lit classes, you can't then apply for medieval history jobs in the hist department or classics dept. So the jobs you can apply for are not somehow "more numerous" than for doing a straight-up single discipline department.

[janewales]

Let's see; I was done, so ... 2009? We had more medieval lit. specialists going on the market than there were job listings in the entire MLA list. That's all they talked about at the dept's MLA party that year. The year before was the "magic year" that there were as many as 45 jobs, but none of our people got anything then.

There were more than 30 jobs on the MLA list for 2009; some were senior rank, and some were in the UK, and eventually, several were cancelled, but it still wasn't all that bad a year. Maybe it was the "magic year" you remember?