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Joint Degree with University of Melbourne

The deadline for applications has ended on 1st March, 2022. We cannot accept any further applications.

The University of Melbourne has a special status among the international partners. A bi-lateral Joint Degree scheme was put in place in 2019 that involves both Potsdam-based PhD fellows funded through the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms, and Melbourne-based doctoral students funded through the University of Melbourne. Among the candidates that will be admitted during the current application process, up to four will be given the opportunity to pursue a Joint Degree with U of Melbourne. The international supervisors based in Melbourne will be involved in choosing these candidates.

Please indicate in your application form whether you are interested in this option, and use your application documents to explain why and how.

This page explains what this Joint Degree option entails.

Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne

Across the globe today, cultural life is being transformed by three key developments: the intensified mobility of people and cultures in globalization; the impact of new media technologies in everyday life; and the far-reaching environmental aftermaths of industrial modernization. These developments produce a number of effects: the reconfiguration of older forms of collective social life into multiple, transnationally inter-connected publics; the transformation of ethnic, gendered, sexual and other identities in the context of cultural superdiversity; unprecedented levels of complexity in public cultures, in everyday life, and in workplaces; and the new cultural centrality of environmental risk.

Cultural Studies at Melbourne prepares students to enter this fast-changing world by directing critical attention to six central themes that reflect current conditions:

  • Globalization and the intensified mobility of culture;
  • Multiculturalism, cultural complexity, and superdiversity;
  • Transforming identities (gendered, sexual, ethnic and others);
  • The impacts of media in everyday life;
  • Cultural and environmental sustainability;
  • Colonialism and culture
  • New cultural flows in the Asia-Pacific region, and Australia’s place within these.

PhD coursework

Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts prides itself for its high-quality qualification programme. It comprises:

  • an Arts PhD Research Intensive,
  • a PhD Research Workshop tailored to the field of the doctoral researcher’s project,
  • and two PhD electives

Details can be found in the handbook: https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/ 2020/courses/dr-philart/course-structure.

Together with our partners we have devised a specific qualification plan that allows doctoral fellows to benefit from this, as well as the RTG's qualification measures, while not hindering their academic progress. Our jointly developed qualification plan accounts for both partners’ coursework requirements through the options of substitution/mutual recognition, completion at a distance, and the creation of new joint qualification measures:

  • Melbourne’s Arts PhD Research Intensive will be completed at a distance by Potsdam-based doctoral researchers;
  • Melbourne recognises the Research Seminar “Introduction to minor cosmopolitanisms” and at least one of the summer schools as equivalent to their PhD electives;
  • while based in Melbourne, Potsdam-based doctoral students will take part in one of the regularly offered PhD Research Workshops tailored to their field.

Thematic requirements

Your project needs to fit into one or more of the following thematic areas:

  • Indigeneity,
  • Bodies,
  • Ecologies.

It should be related to one or more of five key themes of concern to the Cultural Studies Program at the University of Melbourne:

  • multiculturalism, cultural complexity, and superdiversity;
  • transforming identities (gendered, sexual, ethnic and others);
  • cultural and environmental sustainability;
  • colonialism and culture;
  • new cultural flows in the Asia-Pacific region, and Australia’s relationships within these flows.

What the Joint Degree actually involves

  • Enrollment at both Uni Potsdam and Uni Melbourne
  • 12-month stay at Uni Melbourne, can be split into two shorter stays
  • Some additional coursework and reporting responsibilities, a bit of additional administrative effort
  • At the end, a degree from both universities