PhD in Asia Africa and the Mediterranean
As of the academic year 2013/2014 at the Department of Asia Africa-and-Mediterranean the PhD programme in Asia Africa-and-Mediterranean is established
Expected Duration: 3 YEARS
Coordinator: Ignazio Tantillo
In the tradition of the interdisciplinary studies cultivated at the Orientale and in the light of the excellence of the results achieved in the PhDs of the previous cycles, the PhD pursues three lines of research, according to the different space-time coordinates and with the most advanced methodologies in the field of philological studies, linguistics, historical and social sciences and archaeological research.
Innovative Industrial Doctorates
The PhD programme in Asia Africa-and-Mediterranean has successfully joined the measures promoted by MIUR within the framework of the PON Research and Innovation 2014-2020 - Axis I, Action I.1 “Innovative Doctorates with Industrial Characterization.” Thanks to co-financing from the European Social Fund, the course has been able to activate three-year fellowships that provide mandatory experience in international contexts and at qualified companies.
This opportunity has enabled the PhD to enhance its educational profile, integrating academic skills and professional applications with a view to innovation and knowledge transfer. The collaboration with the business world and the international dimension of the paths offered have contributed to strengthening the course's attractiveness, offering doctoral students a solid, spendable preparation oriented to the challenges of the world of work and applied research.
The Ph.D. thus confirms itself as a dynamic space of confrontation between humanistic knowledge and productive realities, capable of generating value for the territories and promoting paths of higher education that are competitive at the European level.
The course aims first and foremost to fulfil the basic mission of every doctoral programme, namely to provide doctoral students with methodological tools at a higher level than those received in the previous training cycle. They will be provided with the necessary know-how to plan and conduct studies organically related to their chosen research area; to identify and make competent use of the necessary sources or critically analyse data, texts, themes, concepts and methods; to identify and use an international bibliography; to organise and present the material they have collected in the form of a scientific text. Beyond the acquisition of these essential skills for every person working in the field of research, the course helps doctoral and post-doctoral students to make an overall qualitative leap. This is an unavoidable goal, which the teaching board is committed to achieving through the creation of distinct training paths, which allow for in-depth study of individual research topics, but which communicate with contiguous paths, in order to create interactions between different disciplines and stimulate a non-sectarian but creative approach to research. This encouragement of the hybridisation of knowledge, understood as a fruitful exchange of knowledge, also has a positive influence on the research atmosphere, reflected in the emergence of a lively community of researchers, open to comparison and ready to engage in international debate in the various disciplines. Doctoral students must be able, at the end of their training, not only to produce a valid dissertation, but also to be able to correctly interpret the phenomena investigated in their thesis project, to contextualise them in a broader scenario, and to be ready to communicate their findings through participation in seminars, workshops, conferences and the publication of articles.
The training will be articulated around the above-mentioned lines of research:
- The study of ancient civilisations, extending the field of investigation from the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian Far East. Research will be carried out in the philological and historical fields, but also in archaeology: several excavation campaigns have already been conducted or are still underway in the Mediterranean area and in other countries in Asia and Africa.
- Study of the languages and literatures, written and oral, of Asia and Africa in their various expressions from the beginning of documentation to the contemporary age. This includes arabistics, sinology, nipponistics, iranistics, tibetology, indology, ethiopistics, indonesianistics, which can be supplemented, in an interdisciplinary perspective, by expertise in numerous other L-OR fields in the Department.
- Study of the history, institutions, thought and societies of the countries of Asia and Africa in their diachronic articulation up to the contemporary age.
Occupational Profiles: The doctorate aims to train experts in philological-literary, linguistic, historical, archaeological and social science research for the geographical areas of interest of the doctorate. In addition to their scientific and teaching activities within the university world, both in Italy and abroad, PhD graduates will be able to spend the specialist skills they have acquired working at an advanced level and internationally in the world of research for institutions and bodies, both public and private, as well as in the field of cultural mediation, international cooperation, the safeguarding and enhancement of cultural heritage, and specialised publishing. The doctoral course, on the instructions of the Department Director, will have to coordinate with the activities of its master's degree courses in the organisation of forms of consultation with ‘stakeholders’ (social partners, territorial agencies, organisations representing the production of goods and services). The aim is to optimise resources and pool the system of contacts of the individual courses in order to set up steering committees structured at departmental level. The doctoral course will be part of a departmental structure counted among those of excellence in the national university system.
