Multimodality and Intermediality: Humanist Research in a Digital World (MIDWorld)

Now recruiting PhD students in multimodality and intermediality.

Digitalization has revolutionized our ways of learning, working, and socializing, and offers highly functional possibilities to create and share knowledge across communities. Individuals have direct access to more knowledge than ever before, yet society struggles with fast-spreading disinformation and isolating filter bubbles. A fundamental aspect of digitalization is the convergence of systems of information and communication into multimodal media spaces which combine, for instance, language, image, color, music, and motion, and form intermedial relationships in the way they are constantly redesigned and redistributed across platforms and contexts. This mix of modes and media calls for new methods and approaches. The interdisciplinary graduate school MIDWorld provides emerging researchers in the Humanities with theories and methods for critically analyzing the mix of modes and media in our digital world. This holistic understanding of present and future media developments will be highly applicable both inside and outside of academia.

The interdisciplinary graduate school MIDWorld is a collaboration between the Centre for Research in the Humanities and the research team in Multimodal Communication at Örebro University and the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University. Multimodality and intermediality research offer complementary frameworks to understand communication in a digitized society and for analyzing meaning-making as part of social, political, historical, aesthetic and educational practices. Approaching digitalization from a humanist perspective even requires historization: all modes and media have a history that helps us understand their affordances and potential for contemporary and future meaning-making.

The graduate school will accept a total of nine doctoral students. Five of these will be enrolled at Örebro University, and will write their thesis in one of the five subject specializations of Swedish Language, Rhetoric, English, History or Comparative Literature. Four doctoral students will be enrolled at Linnaeus university and write their thesis in either Comparative Literature, English Literature, French Literature, German Literature, English, or Swedish language. Graduate students with a master or magister in any of these subjects or with an equivalent teacher training program exam are eligible to apply to MIDWorld.

Apart from writing the PhD thesis, the activities of MIDWorld as a whole include PhD courses, seminars and writing retreats. The PhD students will participate in two compulsory courses with the aim of gaining in-depth theoretical and methodological knowledge within the fields of Multimodality and Intermediality. Further, students enrolled at Örebro University will take compulsory courses that are specified in the general syllabus for third-cycle courses and study programs in Studies in Humanities; students at Linnaeus University will participate in compulsory courses as specified in the general syllabus for third-cycle courses and study programs in Comparative Literature, Language Studies, and Swedish Language.

Important dates and information

During spring 2023, nine PhD candidates will be recruited.

When applying to MIDWorld, candidates must apply to either Örebro University or Linnaeus University, and indicate the relevant subject specialization (see above).

The advertisements for the positions at Örebro University are found here.

The advertisements for the positions at Linnaeus University are found here (in English) and here (in Swedish).

MIDWorld starts on the 1st of September, 2023.

Contact person at Örebro University: Anders Björkvall ()

Contact persons at Linnaeus university: Beate Schirrmacher () and Niklas Salmose ()