Should I Be Passionate about My Research?

A Medley of Voices

“Follow your passion.” The phrase circulates easily in today’s information stream: in career advice columns, reflections on life purpose, social media posts about living and thriving, university application guidance, and graduate prospectuses. Passion promises purpose and vitality. It indicates motivation and a willingness to endure difficulty. Yet it also carries a quiet threat: if you are not passionate, are you in the wrong place? Are you wasting your time?

In this article, DPhils from different disciplines reflect on passion as motivation, pressure, intellectual inheritance, and institutional demand. Their perspectives range from personal storytelling to disciplinary critique and intellectual history. Together, they ask not simply whether we are passionate, but what it means to be so, and who, in the end, benefits.

Passion and the Boundaries of Knowledge: Discipline and Its Discontents

If passion today often feels like an individual psychological state—something we either possess or lack—our contributors invite us to see it instead as structurally produced. Passion, in their reflections, is inseparable from the way knowledge itself is organised.

Student G, DPhil in History, is particularly interested in the historical establishment of distinctive academic disciplines as institutional formations. He recalled an episode from Oxford’s own past: In the 1740s, Adam Smith was reportedly punished at Balliol College for being caught reading David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, then condemned as an “evil book of atheism” but now regarded as a classic. This incident reminds us that the moral security to “follow your passion” has a long and uneasy history. What one is permitted to pursue, and to what extent such pursuit is deemed proper, has never been self-evident.

G: “From the nineteenth century onwards, the gradual solidification of disciplinary boundaries produced new forms of professional identity. With professionalisation came what might be called a double immunity. First, specialists became largely insulated from external judgement: only insiders could fully evaluate their work. Second, individuals were no longer expected to justify their choice of discipline within any overarching “total science of man.”

This fragmentation made modern academic passion possible. We may pursue highly specialised inquiries without defending their place within a broader landscape of knowledge. Our devotion to a topic need not answer to more general intellectual concerns, still less to non-disciplinary expectations or the interests of the wider public. Personal passion, in other words, is sheltered by disciplinarity.

Yet such shelter comes at a cost. When intellectual life is divided into increasingly narrow domains, passion risks hardening into disciplinary fanaticism or protected indulgence. An ethic of responsibility is therefore required to confront this inward-facing loyalty—one that is sustained, and often shielded, by institutional boundaries. Within such a disciplinary context, the question of how to live healthily with academic passion becomes pressing. To live healthily with our academic passion is also to live against its celebratory illusion, and to endure it quietly.”

Cultivating Passion: From Solitary Suffering to Postdisciplinary Curiosity

Vincent Straub, DPhil in Population Health, has a multidisciplinary background in social science, computer science, and visual art. He is active across academic research, policy engagement, and a multimedia practice spanning poetry, film, and installation. His DPhil research explores the interplay between health behaviours, mental health, and reproductive outcomes.

Vincent Straub: “I have long felt that the framings of passion in academic discourse tend to locate passion, derived from the verb patior (“I suffer”), as something innate, mildy neuortic, sinister even: something you feel, deep inside, typically by yourself, working on a particular topic, in a dark library or a wet lab late at night. But what if passion is actually something that thrives and is engendered through a particular way of working; one that is postdisciplinary, open, curious, even disobedient? Might that not be the way we can all experience more passion in seeking to understand the world, together?

Postdisciplinarity signifies an intellectual disposition which “differs from other approaches in its openness, disobedient discernment, and critico-playful attitude towards knowledge-making” (Pernecky 2024, 385). It builds on earlier work by Karl Popper who questions the eligibility of disciplines and studies as distinct branches of knowledge (Popper, 1952). Discovering the notion of postdisciplinarity whilst thinking about what it means to be a passionate academic researcher in the present moment, I was struck by its call for more pluriversalist conceptions of the world—a “world of many worlds” that invites more-than-Western perspectives and encourages curiosity across differing ways of knowing.”

Academia and the Exploitation of Passion

While passion motivates research and cultivates curiosity, academia does not embrace passion in all its forms. Its tolerance is selective. When passion drives productivity and innovation, it is warmly encouraged. When it comes to bringing some personal notes into research, it is met with caution. Researchers are expected to care deeply—but not too deeply. The boundary is subtle yet consequential. These standards may reveal a quieter story about exploitation in the name of knowledge neutrality. Why have certain forms of detachment been privileged as “objective”? And who benefits from that neutrality?

Lorane Prevost, DPhil in Music, reflects: “In academia, passion is frequently celebrated, as long as it fuels productivity and “knowledge-making.” It legitimises sacrifice. It justifies the deferral of financial security or personal stability in the name of contributing to a “better world.” But when passion appears to compromise research objectivity, it is treated with caution. Passion is only valuable when it serves academia’s best interests.

My own work combines two disciplines, Music and Anthropology; neither is likely to make me a particularly competitive candidate on the job market. A strong, almost unreasonable interest for my topic therefore is necessary, as passion must outweigh any concern for my future. If such investment shapes subjectivity, perhaps that is not a flaw to be excised but a clue to power: whose interests have historically been protected under the banner of objectivity?”

Dilemma: When Passion Complicates Critical Distance

Robert James Taylor, DPhil in History, is undertaking research which is deeply personal and passionate. Following this “passion” has involved numerous sacrifices, including those mentioned above, but has also brought him closer to his family’s history and changed his understanding of what it means to practice spirituality in the West today.

Here he reflects upon the implications of “passionate research” into the past, particularly concerning the objectivity of the historian conducting interviews in the present. He is interested in how initial passion can become heavily scrutinised when placed under a scholarly gaze. How can passion at once inspire, and undermine, our research?

Robert James Taylor: “As a modern historian of my own country, researching areas of long-held personal interest, “passion” carries both problems and possibilities. Deciding upon my DPhil topic, of countercultural Indophilia (India-fixation) in 1960s Britain, derived completely from my own experiences, travels, and family history in India. It has therefore constantly been a challenge to maintain a critical distance from my sources and evidence base. This is true of contemporary textual evidence, but even more so the case with oral history interviews. It is particularly hard to avoid positionality or bias when discussing controversial or extreme subject matter, including the psychedelic experience and periods of mental or spiritual distress. When focusing upon the experiential, researchers and historical actors alike are usually “passionate.”

“Passion” sustains the project, yet risks obscuring the interpretation of historical behaviour. I find myself sympathetic to the life stories of the people whom I interview, as they have generously offered their time to participate. Often, I find that we agree on many issues, ranging from politics to cultural appropriation. I want to believe that their Indophilia was affirmative, respectful, genuine, and transgressive in its rejection of “imperial” or “Establishment” British culture. Yet sometimes the evidence suggests otherwise. Critiques of the enduring post-imperial dynamics within their interactions with Indian culture have led me subsequently to question my own explorations of meditation, yoga, psychedelic culture, and spirituality, as well as the power dynamics of visiting India today as a white, Western, middle-class tourist.”

Codetta

If passion once implied suffering, it now oscillates between privilege and pressure. It animates our work; it exposes our vulnerabilities; it binds us to communities of thought; it can also narrow our vision.

Should I be passionate about my research? This medley does not offer an answer to prescribe—we invite you to pause and reflect with us. What do we mean when we call for passion? What forms of life does it enable? What forms does it foreclose? Who is allowed to be passionate, and at what cost?

The TORCH Humans in Humanities Network facilitates interdisciplinary dialogue among humanities researchers on how the human is imagined and represented, recognised and theorised, and engaged and interrogated across the humanities. Please email human-ities@torch.ox.ac.uk to join this shared reflective space for rethinking what it entails to conduct humanities research in a way that allows people to be seen, heard, and understood.

If you would like to share your stories and reflections on passion, or on other aspects of researcher identity, please email us. Join our lunchtime discussions and podcast project. We are always keen to continue the conversation.

References

Pernecky, Tomas. 2024. “Postdisciplinarity.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity, edited by Frédéric Darbellay. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Popper, K. R. 1952. “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3, no. 10: 124–56.

Contributors: G., Lorane Prevost, Vincent Straub, Robert James Taylor

Editors: Robert James Taylor, Huishu Wang

Humans in Humanities Network is part of TORCH Student Networks