what does it mean to study independently in 2025?

perspectives from inside and outside the ivory tower

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the topic of ‘independent learning’ and the status of ‘independent scholars’, autodidacts, people with learning-y hobbies. I’ve been one before, in and around and between my time in organised grad school. There’s a sense in which I am one now, in the strange grey area in between space between my masters and my PhD. I’m always keen to introduce myself as a student, to slightly collapse that time between degrees and say ‘I’m doing a PhD’, not quite telling people I still have six months left of just being an individual not welcome in any libraries.

In the humanities more than other subjects, and now more than ever, I think it’s important to talk about independent research and independent scholarship. People just aren’t able to do degrees easily. Degrees cost so much money, and funding is so slim, and even if you have the time and the funding, there are whole disciplines being axed and defunded. I’m writing this from London but I’ve been reading a lot about the funding freezes and general destruction of research degree infrastructure in the US. There are probably a lot of people (maybe even people reading this essay) who would have liked to study ecology but all the ecology near them has stopped existing. I’ve experienced, twice, being at a university and having all the academic staff in the thing I was trying to study made redundant, and suddenly being left on my own with a dictionary to try and learn something I was meant to be being taught.

I’ve also been watching the cuts to research funding being made in the US. I’ve watched them through the gaps in my fingers as I clasp them over my eyes. I’m watching this as a humanities student in the UK, so I can’t say it’s ruined or will ruin my life personally, but everything that happens in the US echoes in distorted form around Europe. It’s like the Devil Wears Prada blue jumper conversation, where our policies are the trickled down bargain bin version of whatever our rich cousin is doing. I’d be concerned about what this means for UK humanities research funding, but I don’t need to worry about that because there’s no research funding left to cut.

Briefly, I considered trying to get AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funding for my PhD. If you aren’t in the UK or don’t know, it’s close to the only way of doing a funded PhD programme in the humanities in the UK. There are some exceptions to that, and some universities have enough money to fund students on their own, but pretty much, the people who do humanities PhDs with funding to cover them in the UK are peopele who get AHRC funding.

I wanted to enter the very competitive system to try and get that money, but when I did the maths I found that even with the highest level of funding, if I was the luckiest, best and cleverest applicant around, I wouldn’t be able to afford to keep living in my one bedroom flat with my boyfriend and my cat even if I paid for almost nothing on top of rent and groceries. For me, there were two ways to do a PhD at all: either discover my parents had been keeping their billionaire/royalty status from me all this time, or study alongside working. I’m lucky to have a job and employer that are very flexible and make it possible for me to combine studying with working, but I’m very aware of how few people can aspire to that.

In the UK, in the humanities, and increasingly in other places and other subjects, more and more people who love research and want to pursue the subjects they love are going to be looking at a life outside the academy.

We’ll be seeing more and more people in the future facing difficult decisions and choosing to either: study later in life after a long while out of organised grad school, study part time over longer periods, or never being registered at a university at all, studying in their own time. So I think the conversation about independent scholars, private scholars and autodidacts is worth another go round and going to get even bigger in future.

I should start by saying that there are, obviously, significant drawbacks to studying on your own. We all know this. Having no one to direct your reading can feel less like getting an education and more like floundering on your own in circles in a dark forest where the person who holds the map is a long way away. I spent five years reading on my own between my undergrad and my part time masters, and it was a joy to read on my own schedule and follow my own interests, but I had no idea what I was missing, what was important, what I was bad at that I needed to focus on more, where I needed to go next. I’ve met a few people at parties who claim they don’t need any direction in order to learn everything in the world better than anything else, and they’re always exhausting start-up-dude types. If someone thinks they have so little to learn from anyone else that they think their brain on their own can do more than they could with anyone else’s support or direction, I don’t have much faith they’re going to say anything interesting to me. Not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as trying to jump real high cause you think you’ll go further.

For medieval studies students, particularly, I’d say there’s more you miss studying on your own. Trying to learn another language, a dead language with few self-study resources, with no one to correct pronunciation or tell you you’re making the same mistakes over and over again, is really fucking hard. I know that for sure because my ability to read Old English is a lot worse than it was when I was twenty one, no matter how much I’d like to believe the opposite.

But most of the people I meet who are looking at studying on their own aren’t tech bros who think they can do more with wikipedia than with anyone else’s direction or support. They’re people who either would have loved to have studied in the academy but can’t afford it, or people for whom modern academia just can’t work. If you’ve got disabilities, caring responsibilities, aren’t in a position to move to a big city where the funding lives, or don’t have a job that will make part time study work for you, then you’re being asked to give up a huge amount, sometimes everything, to do a PhD in the UK. If I didn’t have the career I have, I’d be looking at a choice between living with my boyfriend and our chubby eldritch cat in London, having a vibrant social life, traveling, etc, and moving back in with my parents to get up at 5am and commute to study with no life, no savings, no possibility of owning a house ever. When people look at that choice and go, ‘studying just can’t work for me’, they’re saying something very different than the annoying dude at the party who thinks no professor has anything to teach him he hasn’t aleady seen in his genius dreams.

The future of the humanities, if it has one at all, is going to mean finding ways for people to engage in scholarly conversations and be a part of academic discourse from whatever platform they’re able to join from. Viewing independent scholars as weirdo hobbyists means excluding a very high proportion of the people who want to have these conversations.

Medieval literature and history are subjects that face meaningful existential threats to their continued existence in the UK. Whole languages are having their teaching axed for budget reasons, and dead languages are getting deader, losing their ability to speak into the present at all. Whole vibrant literary cultures, mythologies, ways of thought and belief are going from having a handful of speakers able to interpret what they have to say to having none.

So I think it’s definitely worth considering experimental treatments here in the eleventh hour. The more people who take part in remembering and continuing something, the better it gets remembered and continued, and funded full time PhD positions for people in their early twenties just isn’t going to be able to supply enough medievalists. Some of the best medievalists I’ve ever worked with are becoming tax lawyers and secondary school teachers.

And for all the negatives of being an independent scholar, there are also benefits. Someone who reads for themselves is, automatically and definitely, more committed than someone who got the funding five years ago and has forgotten why they ever wanted to do this. There are no forms to fill in accounting for where the ninth redraft of a funding application has gone, there’s just the actual work, the commitment no one is paying for, and scholarship done for the right reasons. The vast, vast majority of independent scholars I’ve met, of all ages and backgrounds, are people who could have been inside the academy in a better world, or if their curiousity and drive had overlapped more with research funding priorities.

In around six years’ time I’m going to be one of them. I’d love to make academia my life - it’s very much already the only thing I ever think about - but I’d be doing nothing but setting myself up for misery if I had even a dream of a plan around getting a junior fellowship or postdoc position. Part of the joy of a part time PhD for me is getting to do it longer, remaining in the bath until my fingertips are all raisined up and I should have got out hours ago. Why rush to finish when there’s nothing exciting to go on to next?

Sometimes my mum tells me I’m so good at this there has to be a career in it somewhere and I thank her for believing in me but say there really, really isn’t. I’m only here at all through the grace and favour of the office job that pays my bills. If I get to teach a handful of classes and hold a bound copy of my thesis in my hand one day, I’ll be able to say, ‘I got to do it for a while’, and that’s all we’re really going for here. Barring a lottery win, a dramatic and sudden inheritance or a valuable book deal being dropped into my lap by the lord, academia is just going to be a place I got to visit for a while.

When I see other PhD students talking judgmentally about the work and motivations of independent scholars, it can feel a lot like listening to someone prove to themselves out loud why they could never have exclusion from the academy happen to them. But they’re not different and I’m not different, and budget changes aren’t going to be kind to any of us.

There are not a lot of reasons to feel optimistic about research funding in UK humanities right now, but we are probably living in thebest time in human history to be an independent scholar. In the year I’ve had between my masters and my PhD, I thought I might end up having nothing to read this year. Instead, I’ve had everything in the entire world to read this year. It’s easier to discover things to be obsessed with and rabbit holes to fall down than ever before. Substack is full of people saying very, very cool thing about the Middle Ages. Here on this website I’ve joined a reading group for a novel from a century I’ve barely studied before, hosted by a graduate studies centre at a university I had to look up on a map, and I’ve been to their meetings on zoom and talked about the cool bodily implications of letters and the passing of letters between bodies. No one asked me if I was a ‘real academic’ when I joined them, and I introduced myself at their first meeting as a random lady from the internet, the only person there with an English accent, and it was amazing.

This post isn’t intended to be a list of recommendations or resources (though I could make one of those if anyone wanted). A couple of things that have exploded my brain and brought me more academic content than anyone could read in a lifetime are Perlego and the London Library, which cost £9 per month and £26.55 per month (for people under age 31) respectively. Across those two memberships I have my JSTOR, a deep and broad backlog of literary criticism and theory, textbooks on soil composition, commenantaries on Greek lyric poetry. If I had to spend the rest of my life imprisoned in a tower and all I had to keep me company was online academic resources from Perlego and the London Library, I’d be busy forever.

Language learning is harder to do on one’s own, but it’s not impossible. It’s probably the least impossible now it’s ever been. Interactive parallel text translations are available to make some language aspects of medieval classics more accessible to explore than they’ve ever been (have you met the Digital Dante?) and communities that speak endangered languages with medieval literary heritage are making some cool resources public. I’ve been looking into a lot of this for Welsh and Cornish, two languages I want to get a head start on reading or re-teaching myself before I start my PhD this autumn.

My final thought here is a restatement of something I’ve already said. There are fewer funds and resources available to do Proper Grad School at a university than there have been before, but there’s more enthusiasm, more widespread, in more places among more people,than ever before as well. It amazes me constantly that I can open my substack feed during Women’s History Month and see post after post discussing medieval women’s lives and texts, women I’ve never heard of, women whose stories are being told and retold across media they could never have imagined, in a brave new world. I care very passionately about medieval studies and medieval literature not dying, but I don’t mind if they change shape.

When I think about my inevitable future as an independent scholar, there’s a certain amount of disappointment there. Of course, I’d love to be a real life Tolkien-shaped professor more than anything, but I hope I won’t have to abandon academia completely. I hope we can find new ways for people inide the ivory tower and people waiting outside to meet, discuss and work together. I hope I can help make this the world we live in by the time my PhD finishes.