My PhD: A Retrospective
6 years ago I started my part-time PhD in Classical Studies with the Open University. On 17th December 2021 I submitted the 99966 words of my finished thesis along with an Access database of 2442 magical objects from Roman Britain. Phew. This is huge for me. In a little under 10 weeks’ time I will be getting assessed on it in my viva. In the meantime, and after following a few weeks off for the holidays, I thought it sensible to jot down some thoughts on how the project progressed and changed over the six years, how my ideas have changed, how I’ve managed the part-time research process, and any other thoughts that come to mind. For posterity then, here is a retrospective on my PhD. A memoir might be a better word. It’s a bit of a massive brain dump so if you want a TLDR:
Part-time, distance learning PhD life fits well with the pushes and pulls of the real world but lacks the whole campus-based experience. Oh, and the OU rocks!
Before reading this, note the caveat that I’m not being evangelical about my research or how I’ve done it. Many other different working strategies undoubtedly exist and I am not proposing that my path is the correct one; this is merely a review of the many (sometimes faltering) steps I took along that winding track. I will likely amend and update this post as I mull this over more. I must also acknowledge the privileged position I have had, firstly in being able to go to university for BA and MA studies in the first place, and secondly for being blessed in my relationship with a working partner where neither of us had care responsibilities during my research time. Beyond privilege: not a small amount of luck and chaos has led me on this path and for all of this I am entirely grateful. Getting started
I graduated from MA Rome & Its Neighbours at the University of Leicester in early 2011 and had started working for York Museums Trust between the course finish and graduation. I’d spent a couple of months on the dole and had started volunteering for the PAS and the Bowes Museum in the meantime.
I had always held hopes of doing PhD research. At some point in 2010 I drafted a plan for a project on ‘Magic and Identity’ (basically a souped-up version of my not even slightly flawless MA thesis) and sent it to Dr. Jane Webster. I don’t remember the results of that first conversation, but I soon dropped the idea for a while. It came back up again in 2013 or 2014 when I had got as far as getting an offer of a place to study PhD Roman Archaeology, or something like that, at the University of Kent. I had to decline that place due to lack of funding. It was around this time that, fuelled by a righteous desire to do academia, I wrote and published a paper in Britannia based on part of my MA thesis.
My first peer-reviewed publication was such a buzz I happily started on a venture to be an ‘independent scholar’ doing research things in my spare time to see where it might take me, largely spurning the idea of PhD study. And so, whilst merrily jaunting down that road, I ended up having a chat with Stuart McKie (then starting his PhD at the OU) at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference in 2014. Do a PhD with the Open University? I genuinely didn’t know that was an option and here was this chap doing just that, with a topic on Roman magic. Amazing. I started email conversations with two of Stuart’s supervisors, EJ Graham and Ursula Rothe, and started writing an application.
Fast-forwards to early summer 2015 and I’m in Milton Keynes. I’ve just met EJ and Ursula, also Helen King and (via the phone from Greece) Phil Perkins and they have grilled me on the PhD topic, concept, methodology, etc. At the time it felt like a brutal interview, ensuring I could try and justify why I wanted to research Roman magic, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I recall [note to self – ask supervisors if they remember this]. Straight after that meeting we had 3 hours to make the deadline for the CHASE funding partnership applications and so I set up shop in the OU library and we emailed at least 7 different versions of the application between each other that afternoon, amending and tweaking and fixing, before submission. This was my first real insight into what doing a PhD would be like – the bar that these supervisors set was high.
Anyway, I didn’t get the funding. It came as a bit of a blow really, having managed to get further into the process than before and having a much better project than earlier attempts. The CHASE people had put my application through to the final stages and identified it “as fundable” but, alas, not all fundable projects get funding. So that was the end of that. Time to move on and do something else.
A fortnight later I was at my partner (now wife!)’s graduation in Leicester and in a dull moment during photographs I checked my emails to find an email saying I had been accepted by the OU for the PhD and was offered a full fees and maintenance grant to undertake this. My mind was blown! This came out of nowhere. No-one had told me that applying for CHASE also automatically put you in for internal funding from the OU! I stole the thunder from my partner that day and my life changed. Undoubtedly the greatest stroke of luck in my life. Changes
In order to start the PhD part-time, I had to cut my hours from my permanent contract at York Museums Trust. This was a huge deal at the time, but it was a means to an end – culling part of a pretty rare museum-archaeologist role for the sake of some selfish research. It is, as far as I am aware, still quite rare for part-time students to gain funding for a PhD. I think it’s an artefact of the Open University’s approach to dealing with students who have other life commitments and will be working at a distance from the campus. I thank the OU at every opportunity and will do so here – thanks! Without their progressive approach to funding, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do this project. The OU truly is an amazing place.
Two weeks before starting this I moved in with my partner to a house in North Lincolnshire. She was working in Lincs and I still in York and together we were now living just south of the Humber Bridge. We have moved to a new house twice more since then and are still in North Lincs. I suspect this is a bigger deal for mature students like me than for students who have bounced from undergrad to postgrad seamlessly. Moving to a new house is stressful and not conducive to great research.
Methodology
Studying part-time via distance learning can sway wildly between being really easy and really tricky. My methodology for approaching research was to basically treat it like a job. I managed my work contract to be rigidly Monday-Wednesday and so PhD research was given over to the 9-5 on Thursdays and Fridays with additional time and space when necessary for reading, conferences, seminars etc.
I don’t feel like I have been entirely disciplined with this arrangement, often not starting work on Fridays until after 10am and extending lunch breaks for walks in the sunshine, but I rarely have missed a day entirely. I doubt this arrangement would work for everyone, but it suited my lifestyle and after a year or so it became second nature to the point that now it’s over I’m slightly baffled by the change in working arrangements again. Before undertaking the PhD, I would have said that I do all my best work at night. My MA thesis and my early academic papers were all written in the late evening, often in a university library fuelled by coffee. This also didn’t blend well with my working life of getting up at 6am to get to York, so I had to learn to work earlier and more efficiently.
In terms of the actual PhD, it can be split up roughly into three large chunks. First, the ‘underpinning’ (as Helen King called it) where I write a lot of verbose stuff about ‘magic’ and ‘materiality’ and we see what we think about these topics. My first supervision was basically on the subject of ‘what is magic?’ and I was tasked with going away and reading/writing about that. For my PhD the semantics of magic are important. In 2016 I was fairly adamant that I knew what magic was and how it could be defined. In 2022 I’m much more aware of the consequences of defining it and probably more hesitant to do so, or at least less willing for a definition of magic to be a hill upon which I would die. That first essay ‘what is magic’ ran to 5000 words. I vividly recall the feedback from that first exercise as every single line on it had been amended or queried by my supervisory team. I remember having a wobble as a result of that. In order to fix this rocky start, we agreed that this work could be extended to 10k or 15k words and so it was. In less than six months I’d written more than my entire MA thesis with zero guarantee that any of it would actually be used in the thesis. Writing about materiality was where I found my feet, being much more familiar with material culture and the blending of ancient history, classics, and archaeology as a methodology.
Without going into too much detail (I still have to actually DO my viva, remember?) the data gathering phase built on my methodological definition of magic and establishing a range of objects types that could be argued to have been magical. I then pestered museums up and down the country for 18 months on whether they had any of these objects, in additional to trawling excavation reports, grey literature and online datasets to produce a big ol’ database of magical objects from Roman Britain. This phase took up most of 2018 and 2019. I stopped data-gathering on 1 November 2019.
The third phase was the putting-it-all-together bit. Here I archaeologised bits of the data to get results and then used these results to analyse and pontificate on the implications for the material study of magic in Roman Britain. Whilst the methodology of the PhD is itself novel, all of the really important conclusions are gathered in this third part about which I’ll become increasingly vocal in the months and years ahead.
Changing ideas
Although a lot of the changes were incremental, it’s quite clear that the project morphed and changed as it went along. For starters, the original application sent to CHASE incorporated four questions that could be asked of the gathered dataset of magical objects from Roman Britain:
in which contexts were magical objects used?
are there differences between different regions of Roman Britain?
are there changes over time?
are there links between objects, practices and specific groups in society?
In the end, I only really approached the first question here explicitly. The others were covered implicitly or wholly ignored. The official title fundamentally changed from ‘What was the function of magic in Roman Britain?’ to ‘The Materiality of Magic in Roman Britain’.
I’ve clearly become more interested in post-humanist and phenomenological approaches as I’ve gone along. Both of these theoretical branches were new to me as part of my research and I’ve adopted bits of them, in part, where appropriate to do so. Sensory theory is also implicit in some of my analysis but has been a subject area I feel drawn to. The net result is that the PhD is much less processual as a piece of archaeological work and draws on a broad, multidisciplinary approach. Naturally I think this is to the academic benefit of the work, but it does make it slightly harder to draw conclusions that are concrete. This approach might also mean that the results of the PhD are not to everyone’s tastes, but that’s by-the-by. Being comfortable with the finished product and having it well supported by my supervisory team is more important than any potential impact that this thing might have.
Part-time research
Researching part-time worked well for me. Like most students I can’t have my brain switched on to the task at hand all of the time, especially if the first half of my real-world working week had left me physically or mentally tired. The benefit of part-time research meant that deadlines are always further away, so losing a day to reading something off-plan or attending a seminar, or even taking more time for some self-care wasn’t detrimental. At least not to the way that I work. When writing, in particular, I find myself having many average days interspersed with really good days when the words come tumbling out. I feel like I’m in the matrix on those sorts of days. They are rare, but helped to jump the project forward when they turned up. I never really identified the criteria for their appearance, so have just marked it up to the influence of chaos in my universe. The flip side, I’m sure noted by all PhD candidates in all subjects, is that on some days you are just unable to do add value to the project. Like, everything is just broken. They are pretty hard to deal with, but I think part-time working meant that a short gap of 3-5 real-world days between PhD project days meant that the boring parts were broken up more and the difficult problems could be left in my head to percolate for a while.
Part-time distance learning can be hard. I’m away from campus, campus life and post-grad groups and offices. I used the university libraries at Hull (occasionally, it wasn’t ideal for what I needed) and York (more often, especially to get books to take away) and relied heavily on the OU’s incredible online access to journals and digital content. I very rarely was able to have coffee or a drink with a fellow post-grad though and talk through ideas. Basically, that only happened in person at conferences, so I certainly missed out on the collegiate working and discussions that most full-time, campus-based PhD students have. I was basically strapped to my desk in the same office at home (albeit in three different houses) for 6 years.
Academic twitter continues to be a popular space for classics and archaeology and in here I found a lot of benefit. The social part of social media can easily be underestimated, but it was my main conduit to peers both in the OU and elsewhere. Its also a really valuable resource to find new research articles, interesting blogs, connections with other researchers, and notices of events. Pandemic research
The ongoing pandemic sucks, we all know this. I count myself fortunate that my PhD is undertaken at home on a computer and desk set-up that that was already well-installed before the awfulness of Spring 2020. My cousin is doing a FT campus-based PhD in Physics and lost out on so much lab time. Others were undoubtedly jarred by the change to working at home. I am sure it would have been harder to get the work done in a house-share, away from campus resources and social networks – to all students who have battled through this shitshow – I salute you! The change to working at home for my real-world job meant a lot more time spent at this desk, in this small room so cabin-fever set in quicker than it used to. I count myself incredibly lucky not to have been physically affected by the virus and must also acknowledge this luck/privilege in minimising the number of days lost to Pandemic stress and lack of head-space.
Submission
You would think that six years gives you a good run-up to submitting, allowing lots of time to adjust to the impending reality that a PhD needs to be submitted eventually. Nope. Not for me anyway. I still can’t think of my project as ‘finished’ as it became such a part of my working life, affecting choices on when I worked, when we holidayed, which evenings and weekends I had free, when I could walk the dog, and more. The pandemic changed how we all work from home. It also changed how the OU accepts PhD submissions. Gone are the days of getting it bound and sent off to the graduate office in Milton Keynes, or even handed in in-person with the obligatory celebration photo circulating on social media. All I had was a button to click ‘submit’ on – as impersonal as an email to the local council waste management team.
Well before this I had to negotiate the arcane labyrinth of the OU’s various submission policies, not all of which had been updated to account for the major change of having no-printed submissions. Supervisors, ever the amazing guides through the world of classics, archaeology, and theory, were also dab-hands at understanding these issues.: “Don’t email ‘FASS-Research-Degrees@…’ email ‘research-degrees-FASS@’ as these are separate departments”. Lecturers are clearly underestimated as guides through tedious and conflicting university policy!
All the same, I felt genuinely nauseated clicking on the ‘submit’ button in December. Having it printed and bound grounds the work in three-dimensions and makes it real. I really dislike the ethereal submission of such a large part of my adult life. Still, the post-submission tapas in Hull was really nice. Future plans
Top of this list is PASS THE VIVA and then resubmit corrections so this can be finished. Currently my Thursdays & Fridays are free – weird and baffling – and I will be using them to do all the house chores and watching the birds in my garden. Still, that’s not tenable forever so returning to nearer full-time, regular work is a medium-term goal.
Academically, of course, I would like to convert the PhD into a book. I’ve got some ideas of what that might look like, but I’m sure that will itself be another massive undertaking. At the moment I haven’t quite got the energy to start writing book proposals for an academic publisher. I will, just not yet. I’m still recovering from this huge change. I also hope to write more public-archaeology articles for, you know, money as a way to keep my hand in academia a bit.
One reason for penning this blog is to re-heat the embers of my enjoyment of writing and to try and have some sort of original thoughts.
My PhD path had trodden a course containing luck, patience, occasional hard-work, learning, development, self-deprecation, more luck, concentration, and not a small amount of imposter syndrome.
This path is yet unfinished.
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