Please note that at this time no further applications will be accepted for the Mercator Fellowship.

With the Mercator Scholarship, the doctoral training and funding opportunities offered by the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School will be complemented by an innovative doctoral programme which understands non-academic professional practice and the related societal problems as a distinct research field for a doctorate in the Humanities. Designed to respond to the growing number of students working beyond academia after the successful completion of their doctorate, the programme seeks to support this orientation towards non-academic professional practice right from the beginning and in the early stages of the research project.

In addition to allowing students to gain professional and academic qualifications in and beyond academia, the Mercator Scholarship aims at fruitful synergies between the academic and non-academic practices in order to highlight the potential of the Humanities to tackle societal problems and to contribute to a better understanding of the theoretical concepts that often implicitly underlie social and professional practices.

Due to combining the curriculum of a doctorate in the Humanities with practice phases /experiences in non-academic institutions, the standard length of the doctoral programme is extended from three to four years to provide an adequate time frame to finalise a profession-oriented dissertation. As a result, doctoral students will have the opportunity to undertake field work and to gain work experience. The additional fourth year is funded by the Mercator foundation.

The programme is aimed both at applicants interested in a practice- and profession-oriented doctorate, as well as at doctoral candidates who have already been granted a three-year doctoral funding or an alternative private funding and who wish to apply for a fourth funding year to strengthen the profession-orientation of their doctoral project.

For further details, please see the information on the application procedure and the programme FAQ.

Contact:
mercator-stipendium(at)uni-koeln.de

> Current announcement for the Mercator Scholarships