Performing Matters: Manifold Temporalities
Welcome to the website of the new structured doctoral program at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Here you will find information on the concept of the research program and important information for your application. If you are interested in applying, we invite you to inform yourself in detail here. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via email.
We look forward for your application!
Application deadline: 28. February, 2025
Contact: sdp@mdw.ac.at
Research Program
Performing arts not only require a form that structures time, but contribute to the complex ways in which time is experienced. Despite the variety of ways time and temporality are discussed across disciplines today, the performing arts clearly engage in a specifically close liaison with questions of temporality: On the one hand, they necessarily involve the (re)presentation of time and are experienced as/in time, and, on the other hand, they interweave various time horizons and also reveal the social dimension of temporality.
Our structured doctoral program Manifold Temporalities—based in musicology, theatre and performance as well as film and media studies—appeals to current discourses in which questions about time and temporality contribute to diagnosing the present and reconceptualising the humanities. These include engagements with acceleration and medial assemblages, societal (in)simultaneities, intersectionality and coloniality, multidirectional memory politics and queer temporality. Moreover these include the diagnosis of new notions of temporality in contemporary culture and society and its methodological and epistemological implications for the humanities, reformulations of the “historical” as the object of historical scholarship, and performative forms of historiography.
Instead of attempting an all-encompassing definition of temporality, a deeper understanding of its manifold meanings can be gained from time-based art forms and thus needs to be related to concrete aesthetic material.
The guiding question for our program focusing on interdisciplinary performing arts research is:
How are overlapping notions of temporality—linked to changes in society and media as well as the practices and discourses in the respective artistic fields—treated aesthetically in the performing arts?
Theories and methods
Specific theories and methods arise from the disciplines involved: Of general interest are theories of multiple modernities, the concept of chrono-reference, i.e. the complex linking of varying time horizons, postcolonial media theory, queer-feminist as well as postcolonial theories of temporality or cultural sociological diagnoses of time. Our methodological approach is fundamentally praxeological and relational. Artistic practices of performing will be related to particular materialities, (inter)medialities, (queer) modes of subjectivation, geographies, histories and other aspects relevant to the particular case (e.g., regimes of representation, evaluative regimes, communities of practice).
Our research program is based on a broad, non-normative understanding of music, and adopts—in terms of its focus on performativity—the critique of the concept of “the work” and turns to research on performativity. A comprehensive performance-historical approach that integrates aspects of “performative” as well as “hermeneutic” interpretation from the perspective of cultural studies is pursued. In addition, there are various analytical approaches to the musical material such as notation, recording, performance, etc. Methods of historical discourse analysis or musical performance analysis, music analysis or methods of analysis that pay special attention to intermedial interfaces will be used for analysis. The work on the temporality of forms and formats in audio-visual moving-image media in the connection of transcultural studies and film/media studies reaches back towards and draws connections between intersectionality-oriented Gender Media Studies, new approaches in production research and media cultural studies that combine media archaeological, performativity theoretical and discourse historical approaches. The methodological-theoretical contribution of theatre and performance studies establishes the connection of performance-analytical expertise and the question of the preconditions of performance and figuration. With a view to the specific bodies on stage, interfaces with intersectionality and intermediality analyses also arise. Most importantly, the transversal perspectives of gender studies on concepts of temporalities beyond ‘linear time’ are used as theoretical glue. This ensures our program design also turns against hegemonic practices of canonising and periodising the arts and the corresponding focus on certain genres. In summary, the program generates methodological-theoretical synergies thanks to its focus on temporality in the performing arts.
Dissertation Topics
We are interested in your dissertation idea. Therefore, we invite you to apply with a topic of your own choice that first of all fits into the topic of Manifold Temporalities, that will be based on our concept, and that participates in at least two of the disciplines represented in the program (our aim of interdisciplinarity).
Working and Researching in the Structured Doctoral Program / Curriculum
The program offers 6 PhD candidates optimal working conditions for individual, academic profile development (dissertation) and for exchange and networking in an interdisciplinary environment. We see ourselves as a team and maintain appropriate working formats (workshops, team teaching, etc.). Each PhD candidate has two supervisors from the team of faculty members [link] for individual support. In addition, all doctoral candidates have access to mentoring programs [link] offered by the mdw.
Interdisciplinarity is essential for the program. This includes both: a disciplinary grounding and substantial networking with other disciplines within the program. Gender is understood as a transdisciplinary interface and is fundamentally anchored in the program.
PhD candidates complete their doctorate within the curriculum of the mdw's structured doctoral program. The dissertation can be written in German or English. The program itself is held in English, the commitment to successively improve the German language and bring it to a level of everyday communication is expected.
Faculty Members
In alphabetic order: