A Sense of an Ending: reflections while writing up

Iona Ramsay in edited conversation with Ruth Moore

Can you tell us about your research and what stage you’re at?

I’m in the final year of my PhD in History. My research is looking at memories of spiritual resistance to communism and their political instrumentalization. A key case study is spiritual resistance to communism in Romania, examining its transnational connections with France and the US.

How much has your project changed since you set out on your PhD?

At a superficial level, it’s changed enormously. But it’s also returned to some of the questions that I was most interested in when I was first thinking about doing PhD. So in a way it’s much closer to what I wanted to do. I think the PhD for me is a constant spiralling around and around certain central questions and themes, acquiring more and more knowledge and understanding and building on that.

It sounds like you had a very good instinct to begin with about what you wanted to explore.

It started off from trying to process what I was seeing around me in contemporary society and politics. In this final writing up stage, I’m having to come to terms with getting rid of material that I would like to include and recognising the limitations of a PhD thesis. But they’re quite creative restrictions, I think.

Which have been the most useful connections or networks for you at Exeter or beyond?

I started my PhD at an unusual time mid-pandemic so I was essentially remote for the first year and didn’t have obvious academic communities to join. I dipped in and out of whatever online communities I could find with the SWW DTP and my department. What I gained from that experience was the usefulness of maintaining networks and meeting regularly. That was the foundation for a subsequent project that I led, and have really benefited from, with funding from HASS and the DTP. Developing a grassroots interdisciplinary PGR network gave me space to experiment, to play with ideas and to go beyond my department.

The History department here at Exeter has been good, especially a seminar series in the Centre for Imperial and Global History, and Ex Historia, the PGR network, that’s been fantastic. Professional Associations are useful like the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Memory Studies Association. It’s been nice to meet other PhD students that way and to chat to early career researchers and academics further on in their careers; conferences have also been good places. I’ve tried to do as much as I can.

If you could go back to do one thing differently, what would it be?

At the beginning I expected there to be more order. I was trying to find ways to order and organise my thoughts, and ideas, and work. I think I probably wasted a fair amount of time doing that. So, I would just tell myself to embrace the way that I work naturally and not try to change. It’s been a process of experimentation.

Now that you’re reaching these closing stages – and bringing some kind of order out of the experimentation – how are you finding that?

It’s quite exciting to finally have one long document that that looks complete. It’s satisfying to think actually there is something there; it’s finally looking like a story, like a history. I’m enjoying crafting it and writing it. It’s difficult to contain it all in my head and it’s incredibly difficult to stop editing, to stop reading, to stop just doing a little bit more research. But I do feel like I’m making progress.

Can you see beyond the horizon of handing in?

I think it’s a really difficult environment to enter into. There are so many PhD graduates applying for jobs and the academic world is facing its own pressures. I’m just going to embrace whatever opportunities come up.