The PhD in digital humanities

The PhD in Digital Humanities was established at King’s College London in 2005. By 2010 experience had persuaded us that collaborative supervision of interdisciplinary work is the norm for doctoral research in our subject. This, you might think, is obvious, but we had created the PhD deliberately without constraining what students might make of it. Discussion with students and colleagues led us to suspect that—despite the obvious popularity of nearly anything that the adjective ‘digital’ may be attached to and despite the relative success of the degree program in attracting students—its title remained an impediment. The name of our degree was in effect hiding the interdisciplinary collaboration that our experience had shown was of the essence—and the most compelling, indeed innovative aspect of the degree. Hence, in Autumn 2010 I began negotiations with the academic departments in the School of Arts and Humanities to create multiple synonyms of the “PhD in Digital Humanities,” one for each discipline or disciplinary area. The idea was to make the possibilities of the PhD in Digital Humanities explicit, rather than keep them concealed under a name that is paradoxically both popular and obscure. The resulting programs were launched with the renaming of my department, from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities to the Department of Digital Humanities—CCH to DDH—in Spring 2011.