Planning is well underway in Florence Fröhlig’s office. Around fifteen new doctoral students will soon be arriving at the university and, as director of studies at the Baltic and East European Graduate School, it is her job to welcome most of them.

“Meeting them is going to be very exciting. For me, it’s about creating a safe and welcoming environment for our doctoral students,” she says.

For the autumn semester of 2021, the university is admitting around 15 new doctoral students in the following subjects: Aesthetics, Archaeology, Art History, Education, Ethnology, Gender Studies, History, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Study of Religions and Swedish.

Many of the doctoral students are affiliated with the Baltic and East European Graduate School, BEEGS, which was founded at the university in 2000. Florence Fröhlig was herself a doctoral student at BEEGS and sees many benefits in its cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary environment.

“Being in a multidisciplinary environment is very simulating. You are questioned in ways that you aren’t from within your subject and have to find arguments, find ways of convincing others – and, in the end, this makes the position clearer in your own discipline,” Florence Fröhlig said, when BEEGS celebrated its twentieth anniversary last winter.

On 6 September, interested colleagues and students can find out more about the new research projects. We can already say that, in one project, a doctoral student in Ethnology will study the relationship between Swedish civil society organisations and Russian LGBT+ groups, as part of an international cultural project. Another doctoral student will study the ideas of the Polish-German philosopher Salomon Maimon, and a third will investigate the phenomenon of digital detox in countries in the Baltic region.

Welcome to the digital introduction to the projects on 6 September, 13.00-16.00.