Sections of the Docschool PhilCult

The Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies is by far the largest and most heterogeneous at the University of Vienna. It is home to a wide variety of subjects and methods that cannot simply be summarised in one Doctoral School. The positive experiences with the Doctoral Academies in particular have shown that meaningful and coordinated promotion of doctoral projects requires a certain methodological and content-related proximity of the supervised projects. For this reason, the Faculty has decided to bundle topics within the large-scale structure of a faculty-wide Doctoral School in the form of different sections. In doing so, the faculty is orientating itself towards internationally very successful models of graduate support, which are very coherent in terms of content and do not accept too many doctoral students.

The formation of the individual sections is the great added value for the entire faculty at doctoral level: the rigid boundaries of the institutes are broken down by going far beyond the boundaries of the individual dissertation areas. The Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies has thus been completely reorganised in the area of doctoral studies. This is the main innovation and at the same time the overarching goal that accompanies the establishment of a Doctoral School.

The sections serve to improve the supervision situation and increase the commitment of the doctoral programme at the faculty. In their thematic, interdisciplinary orientation, they serve to provide even more closely interlinked supervision and orientation at subject level in a thematically attractive, innovative field of research. The sections do not work completely independently of the School as a whole, but are networked with each other through overarching initiatives and funding.

The Doctoral School is initially divided into the following twelve sections, the content of which is based on the faculty's subject areas or is interdisciplinary across faculties: