Since 2020, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna – mdw has offered a Structured Doctoral Program dedicated to research in the performing arts. Each four-year program centres on a broader research context, exploring specific questions and perspectives within the field.
Designed as an interdisciplinary research environment, the program offers six doctoral candidates an exceptional opportunity to pursue their doctoral studies under outstanding conditions. Candidates work together within a shared research context while developing their individual research projects, supported by a dedicated team of supervisors and enriched through dialog and exchange with external experts.
The program combines collaborative research, interdisciplinary perspectives and individual scholarly inquiry, fostering an inspiring environment for advanced research in the performing arts.
sdp 1: Music Matters. Materiality, Knowings and Practices in Performing Arts
sdp 2: Performing Matters: Manifold Temporalities
The structured doctoral program Performing Matters: 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?