PhD courses at the PhD School

Courses in the national PhD base

The faculty's current PhD courses

All Danish PhD courses in the Humanities

PhD courses at the University of Copenhagen

Practicalities and signing up

  • It is a prerequisite for receiving a course certificate that you attend minimum 80% of the course and submit an evaluation.
      
  • If you need to cancel your participation, please let us know as soon as possible and no later than two weeks before course start, so we can pass on your seat to the next person on the waiting list.
       
  • A note to our international applicants: The PhD courses at the PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities are for PhD Students already enrolled at a university. We therefore encourage you to document that you are enrolled as a PhD student at your local university before we will consider your registration. Please send the documentation of your enrolment to phd@hrsc.ku.dk. Also note that the PhD School does not provide assistance with regards to travel arrangements or accommodation – nor do we support this financially.

The PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities offers a range of courses each year. These are divided into 1) mandatory, introductory courses (such as a course in research integrity), 2) generic courses that provides transferrable skills (for example didactic, media training, or academic writing in English) and 3) thematic courses.

Thematic courses are elective and provide training in specific subjects, theories, methods, and analytical approaches within and across disciplinary research fields. Some of these are recurring thematic courses which constitute the basic structure of Humanities’ PhD education. Other thematic courses, offered on an ad hoc basis by the PhD school, originates from research clusters, collective research projects and individual faculty members at the departments.

All courses are open for registration approximately 6 months before course start.

You can find an overview of all courses offered by the PhD school that are currently active, in the national course base.

Recurrent thematic PhD courses in the Humanities   

Recurrent thematic courses offered by the Faculty of Humanities are listed below. The frequency of a course is indicated below its title: next occurrence; subsequent iteration in parenthesis. When courses are assigned specific dates, they are announced at the course database, where you can apply for a seat. 

Empirical Research Methods in the 21st Century

Fall 2023  (Fall 2025); Course organizer: Anne Jerslev, Dept of Communication, 3,8 ECTS
Empirical Research Methods in the 21st Century (11-13 December 2023)

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of empirical research methods in the twenty-first century. Emphasis will be placed on the principles and practices of research design, data collection, and analysis, as well as ethical considerations in research. The guiding questions are: “What defines good empirical research today and how can it be achieved in a PhD project?” The course covers both traditional and digital methods to demonstrate where their respective strengths lie but also where they can complement each other. The course thus addresses challenges such as paradigmatic differences in methodology, the use of digital tools and platforms, and the combination of traditional and digital approaches and methods in data collection and analysis.

Facing the Past: Qualitative approaches to memory and heritage studies

Fall 2023 (Fall 2025). Course organizer: Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Anne Folke Henningsen, Saxo-Dept.; 5 ECTS
Facing the Past: Qualitative approaches to memory and heritage studies (6-11 November 2023)

This course introduces and discusses theoretical and methodological challenges in relation to qualitative approaches in memory and heritage studies. Participants are introduced to and discuss these different approaches, will reflect on theoretical positions and methodological choices, and will present their own work and discuss it with instructors and other peers. The course includes an excursion to a memory or heritage site in the vicinity of Copenhagen.

Feminist theories in action: Gender, Queer, Crip, Race, Affect, and the Archive

Fall 2023 (Spring 2025); Course organizer: Michael Nebeling Petersen, Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 5.3 ECTS
Feminist Theorys in Action: Gender, Queer, Crip, Race, Affect, and the Archive 27-30 November + 15 December 2023

The course explores analytical strategies within gender theories, using intersecting perspectives: queer theory, crip theory, affect theory and theories of class, race, and racialization. The course focuses on the use of such perspective in relation to participants projects and analytical practices.

Digital Humanities & Quantitative Methods

Spring 2024; Spring 2026. Course organizer: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Dept of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 4 ECTS
Introduction to digital humanities and to the digital treatment of language data (28-31 May 2024)

The course introduces to Digital Humanities and to methods, standards and tools that can be used for processing and analyzing digital humanities data. The course will provide an introduction to the corpus tool Korp, to basic NLP tools and to machine learning in Python.

Environments and climate: Transformative humanities

Spring 2024 Course Organizer: Sune Auken et al. Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics. 5 ECTS
Spring 2025 Course organizer: Frida Hastrup et al.; Saxo Dept.; 5 ECTS.

The course explores central analytical approaches, concepts, and discussions within environmental humanities. The course will focus and reflect on how, why, and with what consequences environmental humanities can or should be performed as transformative. The course aims to identify and discuss ways to engage actively with ecological issues, contemporary and/or historical, that do not compromise the often open-ended and basic research quality of humanistic inquiries.

Information and Data in Society

Spring 2024 (Spring 2026); Course organizer: Laura Skouvig et al., Dept. of Communication; 4 ECTS.

The aim of this course is for PhD students - who are engaged with various aspects of contemporary information or data societies - to explore historical, conceptual, ethical, and cultural aspects of information and data. The course offers a historical approach to the present information society. It addresses different conceptualizations of information (e.g. as intelligence), the ethical implications of the use of data and information in connection to the data-driven economy, and explores the nature and epistemology of information.

Sensory studies: Theories & methods

Fall 2024 (Fall 2026) Course organizer: Mikkel Bille, Saxo Dept., Holger Schulze, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies; 5 ECTS

This course investigates the role of the senses in human lives in the past and present, by drawing on insights from the humanities and social sciences. While the senses form a central role in people’s lives, they are often unnoticed by people. Sensory studies have developed concepts and approaches in recent decades that show how traditional understanding of humans as having five senses needs rethinking. Through established research, pilot studies, and experimental efforts, the participants apply and discuss methods and theories within sensory studies that focus on the role of the senses in past and present human lives.

Global Humanities

Fall 2024 (Fall 2026) Course organizer: Rasmus Elling; Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies; 5 ECTS

With this 5-day course, PhD students get an opportunity to immerse in state-of-the-art debates in and around the Humanities with other scholars doing research on conflicts that cross borders and/or require the scholar to cross borders.

Whether the research takes place from a distance and/or through fieldwork abroad, studying conflicts can present the scholar with questions of methodology, feasibility, ethics, and security: How to protect yourself and your informants during “hot” conflicts? How to tackle a situation where a field is engulfed in “hot” conflict or where access to the field is shut off? How to approach conflicts that move through different fields, for example through the digitalization of conflict or through the transnationalization of conflict (e.g., forced displacement, diasporic activism, or extraterritorial repression)? How to secure your sensitive data during conflicts?

With such overall questions, the course caters specifically to PhD students from the Humanities working with qualitative methods to understand transnational social, cultural, and political conflicts – whether from the vantage point of Area Studies, history, or interdisciplinary fields that draw on the social sciences. All methods are welcome although there will be an emphasis on text analysis and ethnography in the broadest senses of these terms, including traditional and digital approaches.

Language in society: Sociolinguistic methods and research questions

Spring 2025 (spring 2027); Course organizer: Pia Quist and Martha Sif Karrebæk; Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 5 ECTS.

Description of the course will follow.