One of the best things about doing a PhD is that you get to meet people you have read and respected and can put a face to the famous name. What’s even better is when these people you respect react with apparent enthusiasm towards your own research!

Now in England I have already met with academics I respect greatly and who have written on Portugal. Jose Magone, Antonio Costa Pinto, Cristina Leston-Bandeira and others who I have run into at conferences who write on the EU. But now I am in Portugal I can rub shoulders with the great and the good.

I had lunch with the aforementioned Antonio Costa Pinto a couple of weeks back as he is director of the research institute where I am based here in Lisbon. Today I met with Nuno Severiano Teixeira, someone who I had actually met before as I was taught by him when I was in Lisbon for my Erasmus year. He was in fact quite an inspiration for me doing the undergrad dissertation topic and eventually this PhD. However over the past three years he has been busy being Portugal’s defence minister! But now he has left the government he has got a bit of time spare to talk to the likes of me again! But he was tremendously helpful and enthusiastic about my research and it helps me to have someone as well connected and known as him to help me through my fieldwork.

I’ve met up with several other Portuguese academics over the past few weeks and they have been very helpful and my list of contacts is snowballing! I still need to get properly on the inside of the Foreign Ministry, but I will. And these meetings have helped me think about potential case studies to focus my research further. I am thinking about looking at development aid and Portugal’s role in peacekeeping missions.

On the subject of Portugal and peacekeeping (of course having a former defence minister in my contact book will help) but I will be going to see another academic who I have read and cited on the subject of Portugal and European Security and Defence Policy. I am going to take the train north to Braga on Thursday to visit Laura Ferreira Pereira at the University of Minho. Really looking forward to briefly seeing Braga, I’ve never been that far north in Portugal either.

In other news, I have been looking ahead to April – I have submitted my proposal to a conference in Bath and have been accepted to present a conference in Reading. I am also looking forward to presenting at the UACES conference in Bruges in September, should I be accepted.

But I am enjoying my time in Lisbon. It’s great to be back and it’s going quite well so far I must say.