PhD Courses in Denmark

Dates and time: 3-4 November & 6-7 November 2025 from 9:00 to 16:00

This 4-day course is offered to PhD students from all fields of the humanities who work with issues related in one way or another to climate and environments. The overall aim is to explore central analytical approaches, concepts and discussions within environmental humanities, and to work with participants’ ongoing projects on ecological issues, broadly defined. Further, the course will focus and reflect on how, why and with what consequences environmental humanities can or should be performed as transformative. The notion of transformative, here, is by no means restricted to imply a specific ‘applied’ dimension of research within the humanities. Rather, 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.

The course is open to all PhD students across the humanities who work with projects related to ecologies in whatever way, and who are interested in exploring how their research might relate to societal and cultural transformation in light of past, present and future ecological degradation. The course responsible teachers will offer presentations and facilitate discussions, and guest lecturers will be invited for inspirational talks.

Academic Aim:

Students will acquire:
 - Knowledge about central ideas and approaches within environmental humanities.
 - Skills in bringing their research questions into dialogue with knowledge from beyond the humanities.
 - Competencies to identify the transformative potential of environmental humanities.
 - Insights into knowledge practices, democracy and green solutions, and the relations between these

Target group: Any PhD student from within the humanities with an interest in ecological issues and who is ready to write an analytical piece that engages their empirical field and sketches analytical directions.

Course organisers and teachers:
 - Frida Hastrup, Associate Professor, The Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen
 - Frank Sejersen, Associate Professor, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

Language: English
 

Programme:

This is a sketch, a more detailed programme, reading list and instructions for paper presentations will be provided to participants upon registration

 Day One: Exploring environmental humanities: Concepts, Approaches and Cases
 Day Two: Ways of knowing and intervening: Nature, Science and Democracy

[Day with no programme for preparing presentations]

Day Three: Workshopping participants’ projects; peer feedback and presentations
Day Four: Excursion, and session on reclaiming impact and green research missions, wrap-up.

Preparation: All participants must submit a paper (max 10 pages) by email to phd@hrsc.ku.dk no later than 20 October 2025.

ECTS: 3.4 ECTS for participation with paper presentation.

Max. numbers of participants: 20

Registration: Please register via the link in the box no later than 1 October 2025

Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact the PhD Administration (phd@hrsc.ku.dk).

Literature: 

Lesley Green: Rock, Water, Life. Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa, Duke University Press, 2020.
We will read the whole book.

In addition, we will read c. 12 articles/papers for the lectures and sessions.

(c. 500 pages in total)