a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne

The a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne is the graduate school of the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities – one of the largest of its kind in Europe – creates ideal conditions for an intensive, lively, and open-minded exchange of ideas and offers a unique range of subjects in the humanities and cultural studies, including, for example, philosophy, language and literature studies, linguistics, history and art history, ethnology and regional studies, media and theatre studies, musicology, archaeology, and digital humanities. Since October 2012, the a.r.t.e.s Graduate School is responsible for every doctoral project at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Doctoral students can choose between a regular track and an integrated track. The regular track is the standard model of the individual doctorate, whereas the integrated track is the structured doctoral model that, with regard to the interdisciplinary scope, is designed to allow completion of the doctoral project within a time frame of three years. The integrated track also includes a funding option for the pre-doc phase (six months) and a full scholarship for three years. The a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School serves as a platform for the internationalisation of graduate programmes that can build on a formidable existing network of cooperation agreements in the faculty and draw from the experience of a great number of teaching and research centres. The concept of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School is completed by a special focus on equality standards. The a.r.t.e.s. integrated track addresses graduates who have completed their studies with outstanding academic results in the humanities and who are interested in beginning their doctoral studies shortly after their final examination. The participants are supervised by two graduate class mentors and three academic supervisors, one of whom is from another discipline. In the graduate class colloquia during the semester period, the doctoral candidates periodically discuss the progress of their research with their classmates and the class mentors. The yearly and comprehensive colloquia of the entire graduate school offer the opportunity to discuss topics and advances in research.