PhD courses at the PhD School

The PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities offers a range of courses each year:

  1. Thematic PhD courses (courses with an academic subject)
  2. Generic PhD courses (for example didactics, media training, or academic writing in English)
  3. Mandatory PhD course (the introductory PhD course including a course on research integrity)

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

Read about practicalities and signing up for courses.

Thematic PhD courses

Thematic courses 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 are offered on an ad hoc basis by the PhD school and originates from research clusters, collective research projects and individual faculty members at the departments.

Recurring thematic PhD courses

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.

Information and Data in Society

Spring 2024 (Spring 2026); Course organizer: Laura Skouvig et al., Dept. of Communication; 4 ECTS
Information and Data in Society (12-14 June 2024)

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.

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 Role of Social Sciences and Humanities Research in Sustainability Action (17 - 21 June 2024)

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.

Sensory studies: Theories & methods

Autumn 2024 (Autumn 2026) Course organizer: Mikkel Bille, Saxo Institute, Holger Schulze, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies; 5 ECTS
Sensory studies: Theories & methods (2-3 October + 6-7 November 2024)

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 2024 (Autumn 2026) Course organizer: Rasmus Elling; Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies; 5 ECTS
Global Humanities: Fields in Conflict: Qualitative Research Across Borders (25-29 Nov + 20 Dec 2024)

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.

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

Spring 2025. Course organizer: Michael Nebeling Petersen, Dept. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics; 5.3 ECTS

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.

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.

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.

Empirical Research Methods in the 21st Century

Autumn 2025. Course organizer: Anne Jerslev, Dept. of Communication, 3,8 ECTS

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

Autumn 2025. 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.

A list of the current courses offered by the PhD school (includes announced recurrent courses and ad hoc courses) is available via this search at the national database for PhD courses

For information about PhD seminars, workshops and courses offered by your department, please contact your PhD coordinator.

Generic PhD courses

Most of the generic courses offered by the PhD school are recurring within fixed intervals.

 

 

Mandatory PhD course

All PhD students enrolled at the PhD Schools at the Faculty of Humanities, Law, Theology and Social Science must attend the Introductory Course for new PhD students. 

There are many things to prepare for and get acquainted with when starting the PhD programme. Therefore, we conduct a two-day introductory course for new PhD students each semester. You will meet the head of the PhD school and your PhD colleagues, who start at the same time as you, and you will receive a lot of useful information as well as a course on research integrity.

The course is offered in the beginning of each semester and is rated with 1.5 ECTS. 

Read about the introductory course for new PhD students.

Practicalities and signing up

  • Please sign up for the courses through the link provided in the course announcement in the National Database for PhD courses.
    See the current course announcements.
  • If you need to cancel your participation, please let us know as soon as possible, so we can pass on your seat to the next person on the waiting list.
  • It is a prerequisite for receiving a course certificate that you attend minimum 80% of the course. Please remember to evaluate the course after completion and help us make our courses better.
  • The PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities participates in Denmark’s national network for PhD courses. Courses offered as part of this network are usually free of charge for PhD students from participating universities. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is not part of the network and thus charges for participation in their courses.​
  • ​For international students as well as CBS students there may be​ a course fee.​​