The PhD as Paideia
Semi-enlightened musings on a year spent doing a research degree, brief thoughts on the Humanities-at-large, and five suggestions for the aspiring Humanities scholar.
I recently attended a fascinating seminar titled ‘Lifelong Learning in Late Antique Christianity: A Praxeological Approach,’ given by Professor Peter Gemeinhardt, current Chair of Theology at the University of Göttingen.1
Professor Gemeinhardt’s sought a modified approach to investigating Late Antique learning, a concept frequently structured through analyses of the institution of paideia. Paideia literally means a broad education, understood to be the ideal way to bring up a good, Greco-Roman citizen.
Professor Gemeinhardt aimed to highlight the ways that Late Antique Christians were taught and learnt within Greco-Roman learning traditions that are typically understood as paideia, and which may have taken place in structured, formal, rigid settings such as the classroom or university; as well as the ways that they learned in more fluid, transformative, and complicated ways, for instance within the household or through practices of self-education.
A point that I found particularly noteworthy, and I cannot recall if this was raised by the speaker himself or by a questioner at the end of the talk, was that paideia was understood in Greco-Roman thought to be less a system of education, and more a holistic sense of self, a mode of expressing an identity conceived of through learning, or learnedness.
Granted, this identity ultimately amounted to some combination of citizen/elite/male, but, regardless, I came away from the talk feeling more ponderous than usual. I enjoyed the idea that paideia was a holistic exercise in the self, that it could be channelled through a range of formal and informal practices, and, most of all, that it felt weirdly relevant to the place I’m in, at this stage of my life.
I’m one year into my PhD, and near-ten years down the line of tertiary education. Who I am — myself, me, Madeleine — feels inseparable from my academic experiences. I am more PhD than girl, more research than human. At times, my disappearance into concepts, ideas, books, rows of shelves in the library, feels a little disconcerting. Overwhelming, even.
But within that disorienting submission to the higher powers of knowledge, there is also a slippage. A slippage between feeling and thinking, between body and mind. I do not know whether they slide past one another, creating friction, or whether they cling together like magnets, or whether they become separated and orbit one another. It is all of those things, all at once, I suppose. And, for some reason, it is within that simultaneously embodied and disembodied state that I feel most at home. That I feel most me. The overwhelm fades, and I enter the flow state.
Perhaps the sentiment is best suggested by the Latin verb sentio, from whence we get our ‘sentience’ — and, actually, ‘sentiment.’ In Latin, sentio means, broadly, 'to feel.’ But it also means to perceive, to know, to sense, to experience. It has even more definitions than that, all related to this strange slipping place between experience, feeling, and thought, which can often only be translated via immediate textual context.
It is nice to think that this word exists, encompassing the binding together and pulling apart of sense and cognition. Linguistically, Latin reflects an awareness of the transmission of something internal, something of the deep self, that comes about through engaging with knowledge. It does not discriminate, necessarily, about where that knowledge comes from. Is it instinctual, is it intelligible, is it intellectual? It doesn’t matter, within the boundaries of sentio/sentire/sensi/sensum, that highly irregular verb.
As I grow more comfortable with these entanglements and disconcerting slippages, I have also begun to feel more confident in my research, in my decision-making, in my pursuit of academic success. Although the depths of imposter syndrome are hard to fully swim out of, I feel like I’m at least away from the riptide, treading water; even if the water I’m treading is dark with unknowing.
Another recent seminar I attended, this time delivered by Dr. Lea Niccholai, a Researcher Fellow at Peterhouse College and Teaching Associate at Cambridge, discussed the politics of ignorance in the fourth-century, and partly addressed the concept that comfort with the unknown, at least in a divine form, was a means to express authority.2
This again, oddly, aligns with another stage that I’ve reached in the PhD process: a genuine comfortability with the idea that I am, and always will be, ignorant of something. The quest for knowledge, the hunger for information, the fading of the self into the educational experience: all of this must be tempered by the acceptance that some things will always remain unknowable. It might be due to a lack of expertise or because the dictates of History have simply rendered it so.
Whatever the case, I increasingly understand that ignorance is not necessarily knowledge’s sworn enemy, but rather the other side of its coin.
Beyond these more abstract musings, I think that the second year of my PhD represents the beginning of a concrete life stage. At many points last year I felt like an imposter, and also like I had regressed into a younger, less worldly version of myself. This makes sense, especially because I was returning to the city where I did my undergraduate degree and was struck by old memories and meanings that I needed to disentangle from my present reality.
Honestly, that sense of regression was partly why I started this Substack, now also almost a year in the making. I needed an outlet to explore my feelings about History, and about doing History, and to create something that was my own, something that I was interested in but which could exist outside of Oxford, outside of the academy.
Between starting this newsletter and developing a credible thesis topic, I created a sense of self which could engage with knowledge and education in both informal and formal ways. I began to inhabit and exhibit paideia, becoming a more holistic entity construed through my learning, and through the sharing of that learning.
In terms of further developing this now-tangible career, beyond the philosophical considerations, I feel as though I am finally on solid ground. Not to reveal them extent of the permeation of my parents’ finance-industry speak into my own vernacular, but I do feel as though I’m hitting the relevant KPIs for this stage of the PhD process. I’ve presented at another conference, I’ve been selected for a prestigious workshop series, which I will use the feedback from to develop an article for publication, I’m working on a couple of abstracts for conferences next year, applying for a travel grant to see some mosaics, I’m on track to teach, and I’m managing a student society with direct relevancy to the field.
If this all sounds a little too rosy, or a little too certain, don’t fret. For all of the paideia and for all of the comfort in the unknown and for all of the tangible life stages and career checkpoints, I’ve stood on the edge of burnout and floundered in my analyses and missed deadlines and still, inevitably, struggled with Greek and Latin. A PhD is not all smooth sailing.
Moreover, my attempts to square the circle regarding my thoughts and feelings about the importance of educational accessibility and widespread knowledge dissemination with my desire to be recognised within and validated by an elitist, exclusionary academic institution have been unsuccessful.
But these are lifelong endeavours, personal endeavours, shaped by the educational context I exist in and the learningness of my identity. It isn’t so much that I don’t struggle; rather, that I’m able to better rationalise those struggles. For anyone thinking of undertaking a PhD, or currently undertaking one, I guess I want to suggest that all of this should be seen as reassurance. Nervousness and uncertainty give way to quiet confidence, and you’ll begin to feel like you belong in the rooms you walk into. Your sense of self will be transformed through learning, and the bumps in the road along the way are simply part of that process.
It feels somewhat disingenuous to pontificate on any of this, though, without thinking about the wider context, too. There is a swelling cultural discourse around learning, education, and knowledge, made urgent by the damage wrought by techno-fascists, funding cuts, and generative “AI.”
For every education-promoting social media trend — for instance, the wonderful proliferation of ‘personal curricula’ across a variety of platforms— there is as much anti-intellectual brainrot slop being produced. For every young boy being brought back into the fold of loving literature, reading, and the Humanities, there is another who has fallen victim to the ranting and raving of manosphere podcasters, who desperately needs society’s help.
For every new and experimental approach to age-old questions and fields of study, there is yet another passive aggressive, or even just aggressive, comment about ‘utility’ to ‘society’ on the tip of someone’s tongue. For every inspired undergraduate, with multitudes of fresh perspectives and new ideas, wishing to enter a specific field, there is a line of higher education funding cuts waiting to fall like dominoes, hitting the Humanities hardest.
Considering undertaking Humanities PhD means not only inhabiting the ideal of paideia within the self, or as an expression of the self, but transmitting that ideal outwards. It means translating it across disciplinary boundaries, it means adjusting it to meet people where they are at, it means being willing to change, constantly, your own mind, perception, realm of understanding, to accommodate new knowledge and information.
I question whether this is possible to achieve within the span of a single lifetime. Despite that, it feels like not only a noble, but a necessary goal to pursue.
I wanted this piece to end on a more practical bent, otherwise it would simply be a series of self-indulgent musings with no real purpose, nor a solution to greater issues at hand.
So, in case anyone is not aware, PhD application season is well underway, and the earliest deadlines are rapidly approaching. There are many dedicated scholars currently preparing proposals, to be assessed by professors and funding bodies. Those who make it through that often brutal process may enter into their doctorate and shortly find themselves staring into the gaping mouth of an abyss in a few short months.
I’d like to offer a few pieces of advice for prospective scholars, which is neither trialled nor tested by anyone other than myself. Accordingly, I offer no claims to universality nor do I accept liability in the event that these tips prove to be deeply flawed. These are little more than the small coping strategies I’ve used to make it thus far, on my way to a somewhat enlightened state of paideia. They might be of some use, to someone.
1. Take One Day of Sabbath.
My first piece of advice is actually the first piece of advice my supervisor gave me, in our first ever meeting.
Take one day of Sabbath, he said, kindly, looking me directly in the eyes. I nodded, but I was confused. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Have one weekend day?
I have come to realise what he meant was that I needed to have one day that was sacred, one day that existed outside of my PhD, every week. This day does not necessarily have to be restful, nor does it have to be ‘unproductive.’ But it must be a day where you do not think about nor engage with your PhD work.
Once I understood the difference between a weekend, resting, and a sabbath, my work output improved, because I gave myself the mental space to not think about my work, even if that meant busying my brain or my body with other things.
2. Read for Pleasure.
If you’re thinking about doing a Humanities PhD, chances are you’re already a PHR (pretty huge reader). But, you will find, that a PhD has the ability to suck the joy that you feel for the written word right out of you. There will be times when you crawl home at the end of the day and you simply must scroll. You cannot face meaningful engagement with anything so high-brow as literature. To that I say, fine, I can’t judge, because I do it myself.
Despite that, though, set yourself the challenge of still reading for pleasure at least once a week. Even if it is a single magazine article, or ten pages of a novel. There are many ways to read, and if you solely prioritise one, your brain will, weirdly, atrophy. Spend all day in the library only exercising the academic reading part of your brain, and the other, maybe more creative parts, are going to vanish. Hold yourself accountable to this. It actually does matter.
3. Stand up every hour.
Simple as it sounds. Get up, move your legs. Stand for one minute, do a full circuit of the library, go to the toilet up the stairs rather than down the stairs. It is genuinely amazing how easy it is to get so wrapped up in work that five hours can pass without you realising. Do that for more than three days in a row, and your whole body is going to be furious with you.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve gotten your steps in, if you’ve exercised that day, gone for a run, whatever. Still, stand up every hour.
4. Your supervisors don’t know everything (as great as they are).
Your supervisors are (hopefully) wonderful people. They are also (equally hopefully) very intelligent people. Despite that, they’re still people, and they’re still flawed. They are there to guide you and to offer you suggestions, but you aiming to win their approval is a stupid game, and you will win stupid prizes.
If you disagree with something they say, then tell them, do it differently, move on. If they push back, push back. Understand the limit, of course, but know when and where your opinion and your level of knowledge is a relevant aspect to the discussion. It is, after all, your research.
5. gnōthi sauton
Know thyself. It sounds cliche and dumb as hell, but I really do mean it. Know thyself, know thy limits, know when to ignore thy limits, know thy strengths very well, know thine bullshit and know when thine bullshit can come in very handy (abstract deadline fast approaching, e.g.), know thy habits, excuses, and genuine reasons, and know thine friends, supporters, mentors and otherwise trusted companions.
I would really like to emphasise the last one. As isolating as PhD research and academia can be, it is not a solo endeavour. Without your support network, in all of its interstices, you’ll be lost.
Thanks for reading the Empress of Byzantium!
It’s been fun to write a more ponderous, reflective piece again.
If you’re thinking of applying for a PhD, or if you’re just starting one, let me know in the comments how you’re finding it. Is it an exercise in paideia for you, too?
As ever, if you’d like to read more, do subscribe! Upcoming pieces include another joint work with the brilliant Lucia at Moon Rabbit Musings, more on the Empress Theodora, and a long-awaited return to the drama of Constantine’s era in Byzantium for Beginners.
And perhaps some there’ll be some festive Byzantium, too.
Peter Gemeinhardt, ‘Life-Long Learning in Late Antique Christianity: A Praxeological Approach.’ Paper given at the Oxford Late Roman Seminar, 30.10.25
Lea Niccholai, ‘Divine Unknowns and the Politics of Ignorance in the Fourth-Century Greek East.’ Paper given at the Oxford Late Roman Seminar, 6.11.25