Graduate School

In order to promote early-career researchers and to unite research and teaching, the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” runs a Graduate School. It has offered an interdisciplinary doctoral programme to doctoral students from the humanities and social sciences since 2007. This enables early-career researchers to participate independently in the interdisciplinary research of the Cluster of Excellence, and offers a focused and structured programme in which doctoral students can write a thesis on an issue from the field of tension between religion and politics.

An overview of the current and completed doctoral projects in the third funding phase of the Cluster of Excellence (2019-2025) can be found in the section “Research”. There is also an overview of the doctoral projects of doctoral students from the first (2007-2012) and second (2012-2017) funding phases of the Cluster of Excellence.

Each doctoral candidate is supervised by a team from the Cluster of two professors and a mentor with a doctorate. The doctoral programme also offers courses on selected aspects of career paths within and outside academia. Graduates of the Graduate School have been employed, for example, at other universities and research institutions, as well as in publishing houses, schools, ministries, church institutions and libraries.

Responsibility for organizing the Graduate School lies with the Coordination for Supporting Early-Career Researchers. The interdisciplinary doctoral programme is based on the research programme of the Cluster of Excellence, and is designed to train doctoral students in the traditions and requirements of their own research discipline, while at the same time broadening their horizons beyond the boundaries of disciplines and subject areas, and preparing them for careers within and outside academia.