Writing (and finishing!) a PhD: A Personal Story

When I was 21, I started a doctoral programme at Oxford in classical Greek literature. I had graduated from Cambridge with a BA in classics only three months earlier and had scarcely had time to think about what I wanted to research. I intended to write a thesis about ancient comedy and tragedy, but had no much more specific design than that. It took the best part of a year for the outlines of my project to take shape and a further six months for the entire structure to be satisfactorily defined. The money from my British Academy studentship ran out 18 months later. I then started work as a casual lecturer and tutor for several colleges in the university, and for two years juggled a heavy workload, my doctoral research and a precarious income. Somewhat disillusioned, I drifted out of university and began a career in the civil service. The thesis was about two-thirds done. 

In my teenage years, I had wanted only two things: to be a priest and an academic, and preferably both together. My aspiration to become a priest had dropped away. But even after leaving Oxford, I remained determined to finish my DPhil. In the early nineties, the new British Library had not yet opened. After a day in the department, I often hurried across town to the British Museum, where the old reading room offered a uniquely tranquil, uniquely cerebral atmosphere for study. The Institute of Classical Studies on Gordon Square was another haunt. But when I was posted to Brussels in 1998, my research habits lapsed. Several years would pass before I had the time and motive to look again at my uncompleted thesis. But by then, other researchers and scholars had occupied the field, making my own project unviable.

I guess many people would have given up at that point. But by 2007, I had acquired an MA in modern Greek and a passion for the poetry and novels of Yannis Ritsos. I determined to embark on my second PhD, applying the lessons of my professional career and correcting for the mistakes I had made twenty years earlier. This time, the project was conceived from the outset as part-time research, and I knew more or less exactly what I wanted to do before the clock started. King’s College London gave me six years to do the research with a further two to complete the writing-up. I had a good plan and the will to implement it.

When I set off in January 2008, I was now a senior civil servant: the success of my studies would, therefore, depend on my ability to weave the research into the complex and demanding pattern of my working days. In the first five years, I held difficult jobs at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs: first, I ran the exotic disease programme; then the private office of the Secretary of State; and finally, the project to transfer the canals and rivers of British Waterways into a new charity. But throughout all this period, I was also working hard on my thesis. 

My working pattern became a fixed habit: on most days of the working-week, I was up at 4.30 in the morning, to do two hours’ research before getting myself ready to cycle into work. This was particularly hard in the dark winter months and I often recalled the psalmist’s words: ‘It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep’. I was usually too tired to do more than half an hour or so in the evenings, so the weekends were crucial. But this habitual dedication of time worked well, and the thesis steadily grew. 

Submitting the thesis for exam: January 2019

From January 2013, the Foreign Office posted me to Athens. For four years, the university suspended my status as a student. This was a mark of faith on the university’s part: I guess that some there will have feared that I would never return to my studies. But my time in Athens strengthened my convictions about the value of my project and deepened my pool of knowledge about Ritsos. In December 2016, back once more in London, I picked up the threads. This time, however, my full-time job and my studies proved incompatible. I parted company with the diplomatic service in August 2017, with the intention of finding some sort of part-time employment alongside my studies. 

Within a few months, I had a first draft of the entire thesis, a contract with a Greek shipping company as a member of its board of directors, and an unpaid role as chair of a small charity, the Anglo-Hellenic League. My gamble had paid off. It took me some eight further months to revise and present the thesis, which I did in January of this year. In May, I defended it successfully in front of my examiners, and I was awarded the PhD on 1 June. Job done.

Successful defence of the thesis: 15 May 2019
with my examiners, Dr Philokyprou and Prof Tziovas 

All in all, it took me just over 30 years to acquire a doctorate: much more than half my life so far. And the PhD was eventually awarded in a different discipline from the one I envisaged in 1988 and by a different university, after a 25-year career that I had never originally intended (but which proved astonishingly rich and varied in its opportunities). Along the way, I have acquired a full repertoire of life lessons and an astonishing range of debts: to academics, work-colleagues, friends and family. My husband has throughout been supremely understanding, tolerant and supportive. My two academic supervisors, Prof. Ricks and Prof. Beaton have been pillars of strength, great counsel, constant sources of inspiration.

The thesis as deposited - June 2019

My path has been a circuitous and at times uncertain one. But the determination I had at the age of 21, while subjected to many stresses, challenges and set-backs over the years, remained fundamentally strong. Coming to believe in myself and developing the resilience and flexibility to find a way around my own weaknesses and failures have been key to completion of my second doctoral project. One should never give up. But appropriate tactics have to be evolved and mastered, to prevent determination from sliding into mere stubbornness. Ultimately, the patient accumulation of expertise and knowledge pays off.

Of course, a completed PhD is only the start of projects to come, and I have several in mind. In the years ahead, I plan to be writing and publishing about Ritsos in particular, and Greece more generally. These are my passions, and I hope that what I have to say will be of interest!

John

Job done

Methana's magical beauty. The incidental effect of book reviews.

I’ve been doing some book reviewing recently. It’s an important, but sometimes brittle art. I read a lot of book reviews, using them to make purchases and to help me in my academic work; but they’re also essential for maintaining a broad intellectual perspective. If a review’s editorial policy is right, a subscriber should be able to build up from it annually a good sense of the important trends in publishing: where the strong currents are taking us; where the main centres lie; what the colourful, eccentric outliers are. So, I subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement and Athens Review of Books, and keep an eye on The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books through Twitter. The arrival of the TLS every Thursday is certainly one of the highlights of my week.

When I am reviewing, I tend to agonise over things. I’ve never reviewed anything from which I haven’t learned something I didn’t know before. So I try to avoid too much qualitative assessment: the notion that I am passing a verdict. Of course, peer review is important and salutary; bad books are published from time to time and it may be important to identify them as such. But I don’t like the high-handed review or murderous review by a thousand pedantic cuts.  I always try not only to give a fair account of the book itself and to reflect on the underlying issues: what is at stake here? what is the book teaching us? But I try also to situate myself in relation to the book: why am I reviewing it? what value is my opinion adding? The best pieces that I read are often those for which the review editor has given the reviewer a generous word limit and two or three books to consider; the article can then weave in and out of the books and the reviewer’s own insights. There are masterly pieces like this in every edition of the TLS, ARB, NYRB, LRB.

The two reviews that I’ve finished writing were of important and interesting books, and I’ll post links to them when they issue. As ever, some of the enjoyment of reading books closely and carefully lies in the extraction of further reading lists. Thanks to one of those I’ve just reviewed, I’m now half-way through Robert Liddell’s engrossing, opinionated book on Aegean Greece (1954). Liddell was hooked on the idea that the central hero of the Aegean was Theseus, and he spends some time locating and explicating the scenes of the myth: perhaps the most captivating is his account of Troezen and Poros – well worth comparing with Mary Renault’s novels The Bull from the Sea and The King Must Die. But there is much else of interest, not least the author’s enthusiasm for the architecture of Mykonos, Folegandros and Amorgos – at a time well before the arrival of mass tourism. And he describes the Aegean beautifully; here is part of his description of the Argo-Saronic Gulf:

The journey continues and the villages of Methana become visible; that blue silhouette takes on the actuality of grey rock, sprinkled with olive trees. But though the outline of Methana has now lost its almost magical beauty, there are the two lovely forms of the islands to be seen: behind is Aegina with its sharp peak, Prophet Elias; and in front are the gently rising domes of Poros. Here in the Saronic gulf we are still in the nome of Attica, and here sea and mountain are transfigured by the clear Attic light – a light only equalled by the extraordinary Apollonian radiance of Delos.

It puts me in mind of the need to organise our summer holiday.

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I’ve had some bad health in the last fortnight or so, and have spent quite some time with the GPs in my local medical practice and with the paramedics, nursing and medical staff of St George’s Hospital, Tooting. It is St George’s Day today: a good opportunity to record my admiration for the professionalism, compassion and care of staff in general practice and at our local hospital. The NHS may not be a perfect institution (what is?), but when we need it and call on it and find it there to support us, we have every reason to be grateful for it. I for one am very grateful.

John

St George’s Day, 2019