When Jack Williams heard his PhD dissertation would likely be read by just a handful of people, he decided that a novel approach to expanding its reach was needed. Literally.

“On average, only five people will read a doctoral thesis – and one of them is usually your housemate – so I thought it would be good if I could smuggle something of my ideas into a book,” said Dr Williams, whose debut novel,��,��is��published by RedDoor Press.

While his editors cut most of the deeper reflections on political philosophy from the book’s final draft, the central narrative of a British graduate student taking a doctorate at a prestigious American university leans heavily on��Dr Williams’��own experiences at Princeton University, where he was based for a semester while doing his doctoral degree at the University of Zurich.

“At Princeton, every chair or professorship is named after a benefactor, which got me thinking about what would happen if a poor British PhD student accepted a grant from someone, or a source, that turned out to be a bit dodgy,” Dr Williams told��Times Higher Education.

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“I started writing down ideas or funny stories that people told me – such as the lecture where the wrong speaker turned up and spoke because they had the same name as the intended speaker – and would write my thesis in the day and do 1,000 words on the novel in the evening,” added Dr Williams, a political scientist who has established a research institute at Zurich focused on resolving global conflict.

Britain’s��most famous campus novels��– particularly those��such as David Lodge’s “campus trilogy”, Malcolm Bradbury’s��The History Man��and Kingsley Amis’��Lucky Jim��– have centred on academics and professors, while the US’ “dark academia” canon, which includes Donna Tartt’s��The Secret History,��concerns undergraduates. University of York graduate Dr Williams�� believed that focusing, instead, on a PhD student provided more potential for comic literature – given their liminal and insecure position within academia.

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“Universities are so interesting in terms of hierarchical power, and the PhD researcher has an interesting place within this hierarchy – they are teaching but still a student, while they are also expected to be researchers but they aren’t faculty. It’s a nice perspective to explore how power dynamics within a university play out,” he said.

While the exploits of��Pond Life’s protagonist, Tom, a “modern-day Adrian Mole” who is swept into progressive political activism on campus following the election of Donald Trump, are primarily comedic, Dr Williams said he hoped the book��would also highlight more serious issues of privilege and inequality in academia.

“It’s a satire but it raises some important points,” he said. “When people are laughing, there is an opportunity to get them to think about ideas in a way that they wouldn’t if you approached them very seriously.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com