This morning I received an immensely pleasing email: my PhD examiners have ratified my minor corrections to my thesis, and they’ve submitted the final paperwork. I won’t get formally notified about it for another few weeks, and I won’t graduate until the summer, but there is no more work for me to do. I’ve officially finished my doctorate.
It seems a good opportunity to post on here for the first time in quite a while. For the past three and a half years, I have either been working on my research or dealing with a rather dramatic kidney-related health saga. (More on that another time, perhaps…) But now I’ve surfaced from both, so it’s time to dust myself down and take stock.
My thesis title is ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and Englishness, 1887-1968,’ and I’ve really loved the whole process. I’ve been carrying out my PhD at King’s College London, thanks to funding from LAHP. My research has involved digging into the stories of famous writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and Michael Morpurgo. Alongside them, I’ve researched almost-forgotten but fascinating figures such as George Ives, a tormented gay rights campaigner, and J.C. Squire, the dethroned king of interwar literary criticism. It’s been immensely fun to trace the way all of these men were linked to one another by cricket. Obscure acquaintances know me as the ‘cricket doctorate guy,’ which I guess has been a usefully memorable identifier.
There have been some big highlights along the way. In 2023, I spent a very happy month in Austin, Texas, going through huge quantities of archive material (yes, including lots of cricket content) at the brilliant Harry Ransom Center. In 2024, I published my first peer-reviewed journal article, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,’ which generated a nice bit of interest in my research. And in 2025, I actually joined a cricket club and started playing (or trying to play) cricket for the first time since school. Some things are naturally easier when one is an adult rather than a teenager. Ball sports, I can confirm, are not one of them.
My journal article, which was published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, was shortlisted for a prize in the world of academia, and won another in the world of fandom: I was a Doylean Honoree for the ACD Society for my scholarly contribution to work on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle. This was a very fun and completely unexpected turn of events, though sadly I was not able to get to New York at four days’ notice to attend the prizegiving.
And now that the PhD is complete, what’s next for the Cricket Doctorate Guy? It’s time to build on my research! I’ve got something in the pipeline that I’m very excited about, which I’ll share as soon as I’m ready…