| Program start date | Application deadline |
| 2023-05-06 | - |
| 2023-09-18 | 2023-07-31 |
| 2024-01-15 | - |
Program Overview
Overview
A PhD, also known as a doctorate, is a requirement for a career as an academic or researcher. In addition, it has become a qualification valued by many employers who recognise the skills and commitment a PhD requires. Employers also recognise that a PhD indicates excellent research capabilities, discipline and communication skills.
Over the duration of the PhD, you produce an original piece of research of up to 100,000 words, in English or in German. Recent and ongoing research topics include German literature and mathematics from 1800 to the present, and the literary motif of wandering from Romanticism to the twentieth century.
The Department of Modern Languages offers supervision from world-class academics with expertise in a wide range of disciplines, able to support and guide you through your research. Your progress is carefully monitored to ensure that you are on track to produce a thesis valued by the academic community. Throughout your programme, you are able to attend and contribute to research seminars, workshops, and research and transferable skills training courses, many of which benefit from the broader context of the Centre for Modern European Literature. You are also likely to gain experience teaching.
You may be eligible for a fully-funded PhD scholarship to support your studies with us. For the full list of scholarships available within the School, please see our postgraduate funding page.
Program Outline
Course structure
Duration:
3 to 4 years full-time, 5 to 6 years part-timeResearch
Research areas
Staff research interests in German include: Austrian studies; post-Idealist philosophy and the German lyric tradition; naturalism; modernism and 20th-century literature, especially Rilke, Kafka, Mann, W G Sebald and Jean Améry. Other areas of specialism within the School include: Beckett; Proust; the European avant-garde; modernism and postmodernism; cross-cultural transmission; translation theory; literary theory and aesthetics; Jewish writing; and literature and fundamentalism.
The research culture is consciously conceived as interdisciplinary, through close links with the Centre for Modern European Literature (co-directed by German). Regular research seminars help to bring postgraduates together as a community, as well as to introduce them to visiting speakers from outside the University.
We can supervise postgraduate students in any of the areas listed in our staff research interests, as well as in other main fields of German and European literature. We encourage you to contact us to discuss your plans at an early stage of your application.
Centre for Language and Linguistics (CLL)
Founded in 2007, the Centre for Language and Linguistics (CLL) promotes interdisciplinary collaboration in linguistic research and teaching. Membership embraces not just the members of English Language and Linguistics but also other SECL members with an interest in the study of language, as well as researchers in philosophy, computing, psychology and anthropology, reflecting the many and varied routes by which individuals come to a love of language and an interest in the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of linguistics.
Centre for Modern European Literature
Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements of the modern period have traversed national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. Co-directed by members of Comparative Literature, French, and German, the Centre for Modern European Literature aims to promote collaborative interdisciplinary research that can do justice to these kinds of border crossing.
Ranging across English, French, German, Italian and Spanish literature, the Centre focuses in particular on the European avant-garde, European modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, the international reception of European writers, and the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, including painting, photography, film, music and architecture. The Centre’s activities include a lecture and seminar series and the regular organisation of conferences. It also works with the editors of the postgraduate journal Skepsi.
Careers
A postgraduate degree in German shows you have advanced knowledge of the culture of Europe’s economically most significant country and opens employment possibilities in areas such as media, publishing and European administration. Previous graduates have gone on to work in these areas as well as using the qualification as a basis for entering higher-level positions in the public sector. A large number of MA graduates go on to doctoral studies, either at Kent or at other leading institutions in the UK or German-speaking world.