PhD Courses in Denmark

Course description

Most studies of literature, art and culture have a historical dimension. Even contemporary research objects can be studied historically. Indeed, ever since the 19th century there has been a strong tendency in the humanities to equate understanding of a work of art or a cultural phenomenon with historical understanding. In this course, we discuss recent scholarly approaches to fundamental questions of historiography: How do we historicize? How do we delimit a period, how do we select representative works or events? How do periods overlap and how do we work with anachronisms or the untimely? Do we write histories of rupture or continuity, of the global or of the local? Whose history is it, anyway, and how do we make it matter to contemporary readers?

The aim is to reflect on the possibilities, limitations and choices involved in writing literary art and cultural history. But also, importantly, to link this general reflection to the participants’ individual PhD projects, and hopefully provide participants with fresh ideas and inspiration for the historiographical challenges they face in their projects. PhD-students from all fields within Art, literature and culture, who have projects on old or new art, literature and culture, are invited.

The course consists of three workshops, described below.

For each workshop, the participants will hand in a presentation of a specific problem in their own research that relates to the topic of the workshop (approx. 0,5-1 page for each workshop). Participants will be asked to read all theoretical texts and texts handed in by fellow PhD students

Intro and Workshop 1: Context and scale - 25 April, 9.15-15.00
This workshop focuses on how and why we contextualize. Very often, an analysis or a value judgment of an artistic work involves historical contextualization. The context provides a framework for the analysis and the work in turn reinterprets that context. But what is in a context? Does it encompass mainly other works of art or literature, political and philosophical writing or historical events? How do we delimit a context geographically and temporally? Do we work on local, national, regional or planetary scales, and do we confine or interest to a year, a decade, or a period)? How, finally, do we integrate contextualization and the analysis of specific cultural artefacts in academic writing?

Readings: TBA
Eg. Bruce Robbins: “Cosmopolitanism and the Historical/Contextual Paradigm”

23 April, 12.00: Deadline for submitting a description of a problem in the participant’s own PhD project related to the topic of workshop 1. Please send your description to Jakob Ladegaard (litjl@cc.au.dk).

Workshop 2: Temporality and periodization - 2 May, 9.15-15.00

Historiography does not only provide us with a list of dates of important events. It links the events into meaningful chains of a ‘before’, a ‘now’, and an ‘after” or a future. It creates narrative structures and causality out of the events and phenomena it integrates. But different kinds of narrative patterns are available. Do we emphasize historical breaks and conflicts or search for lines of slow development and continuities? What concepts do we use to link cultural phenomena, works of art and literature into temporal sequences (influence, inheritance, imitation, revision, rejection etc.). One of the most well-worn principles of discursive organization in cultural historiography is the period, but demarcation lines between periods can be drawn and challenged in myriad ways, and at least since the Renaissance the language of periodization has also been part of artists and authors’ active self-presentation. A critical look at periodization is therefore in order, but the question is if we can do without them.

Readings: TBA
e.g. Didi-Huberman: “Before the Image. Before Time. The Sovereignty of Anachronism”

30 April, 12.00: Deadline for submitting a description of a problem in the participant’s own PhD project related to the topic of workshop 2. Please send your description to Jakob Ladegaard (litjl@cc.au.dk). 

Workshop 3: Canonization and relevance - 9 May, 9.15-15.00
Historiography perhaps unavoidably produces centrality and marginality, but the borders between these categories are constantly changing as works and artists are forgotten or reappraised. How are certain works canonized and remembered? What criteria do we employ to select certain works for study and historical centrality? How do we treat marginalized writers and artists? What is the relation between masterpieces and that which the literary historian Margaret Cohen terms “the great unread”? What methods exist to explore archives of art, culture and literature? What is the relevance today of (studies of) historical works?

Readings: TBA
E.g. Marco Fomisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus (eds.), Marginality, Canonicity, Passion (excerpt)

7 May, 12.00: Deadline for submitting a description of a problem in the participant’s own PhD project related to the topic of workshop 3. Please send your description to Jakob Ladegaard (litjl@cc.au.dk). 

Aim

The aim is to discuss how we historicize, that is: contextualize, periodize, canonize literature, art, music, theater and other cultural products. The PhD student will gain critical awareness about different historical methods and the aims of historicization.

Target group/Participants

PhD students at all levels who work with the history of art, literature and cultural studies from antiquity until today.

Lecturers

Jakob Ladegaard

Venue

25 April, 9.15-15.00 - Langelandsgade 141 , 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

2 May, 9.15-15.00 - Langelandsgade 141 , 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

9 May, 9.15-15.00 - Langelandsgade 141 , 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

Application deadline

26 February 2025.