PhD courses at the PhD School

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.
Language in society: Sociolinguistic methods and research questions (25+26 March, and 2, 3 + 9 April 2025)

In this five-day course (divided into 2+2+1 sessions), PhD-students will explore language in society from different perspectives and through different methods. They will be introduced to variation across time and space, multilingualism and language socialization, gender and language, and questions arising from doing sociolinguistic research in post-colonial contexts. Linguistic ethnography, approaches drawing on generative AI, diachronic analysis, discourse analysis and interaction analysis will be introduced. Participants will be asked to integrate some of the presented approaches with their own research in a small conference presentation.

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

Autumn 2025 (Spring 2027) Course organizer: Camilla Bruun Eriksen, Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 3.9 ECTS
Feminist theories in action: Gender, Queer, Crip, Race, and Affect (1-5 + 19 September 2025)

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.

Environments and climate: Transformative humanities

Autumn 2025 (Spring 2027) 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.

Facing the Past: Qualitative approaches to memory and heritage studies

Autumn 2025 (Autumn 2027) Course organizer: Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Anne Folke Henningsen, Saxo Institute; 5 ECTS

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.

Empirical Research Methods in the 21st Century

Spring 2026 (Autumn 2027) Course organizer: Anne Jerslev, Dept. of Communication, 3,8 ECTS
Empirical Research Methods in the 21st Century (14 - 16 January 2026)

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.

Digital Humanities & Quantitative Methods

Spring 2026 (Spring 2028) Course organizer: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 4 ECTS

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

Information and Data in Society

Spring 2026 (Spring 2028) 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

Autumn 2026 (Autumn 2028) Course organizer: Mikkel Bille, Saxo Institute, 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

Autumn 2026 (Autumn 2028) 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.