I’ve recently got back to the UK after spending a year living in Toronto, Canada, for a postdoctoral research fellowship. This was my first full-time academic role after finishing my DPhil in 2020 – a Mellon Foundation-funded fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, a Catholic research centre dating back to the 1920s. It’s a little hard to believe the year has gone by already! It has been an adventure to move to a new country, and a joy to be given the opportunity to begin a new and exciting research project.
After spending my whole academic career to date in Oxford and Cambridge, I was looking forward to experiencing a different academic community. PIMS is associated with the University of Toronto, particularly with its Centre for Medieval Studies, while being independent of it by virtue of its Catholic identity. At one time it trained graduate students in medieval studies; these days the focus is different, combining a summer school in manuscript and textual studies, and the granting of several postdoctoral fellowships each year to early-career medievalists.
Being part of a small research institute, rather than a graduate student in a large university department, had lots of benefits – from my own office (!) to the chance to present my ongoing research to colleagues and the wider medievalist community on two occasions over the year. I was one of four Mellon fellows, all of us at a roughly similar point in our careers (which is to say, very uncertain of what the future would hold). The rest of the institute is a mix of active and retired academics, at UofT and other institutions, and administrators and associates, including several Catholic religious. It’s a fairly unique combination in many ways, offering the perspective and expertise of scholars of a range of ages as well as disciplines.
Every postdoc or research fellowship is different, and PIMS is again unusual in offering a high level of input to the research projects of their early-career fellowships. I had an advisor who helped me set goals and work out the best way to pursue my proposed project, and I presented work in progress at two seminars, receiving detailed questions and feedback from various members of the community. This support was particularly important for me, as the work I was doing was in a new direction from my doctoral work, both in terms of content and methodology, so I had to be committed to learning a lot over the year.
The culture at PIMS and the Centre represents a long tradition of interdisciplinary, skill-focused medieval studies, particularly reflected in the fact that Toronto is the place to be for work on medieval Latin, something which rather puzzled non-medievalist friends and family! Again I benefited from an opportunity to learn, as I took the intermediate Latin class along with the Centre graduate students, consolidating what had largely been self-taught Latin skills. My horizons have definitely broadened as a result, as I’ve moved out from a focus on English literature, to a research direction more grounded in the pan-European Latin literary and religious culture of the Middle Ages.
My overriding feeling about the year was that I was well provided for – in my living situation, my Christian community, and my academic life. God’s provision was lavish and timely in all these areas, but I felt it especially with regards to my research.
That may sound a little odd to some, given how much our language around academic career-building puts the emphasis on a demanding combination of individual talent, hard graft, and (frankly unreasonable) perseverance. But this experience has led me to recognise again how much of my academic journey is out of my direct control and down to a range of providential factors, including the generosity and insight of mentors and peers, often in ways I wouldn’t have known to ask for. If any good has come out of my research work to date – whether adding truth and understanding to the field, prompting people to rethink their ideas of the Middle Ages and medieval religion, or simply my own joy in doing the work – then this is down to God’s arrangement and enabling.
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