PhD Food Heritage
The PhD in Food Heritage: Cultures and Identities is a formative offer of high studies, of an interdisciplinary and unique nature in Portugal. Existing since 2015 in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, it was created with the aim of elevating the multidimensional theme of Food to the status of a university scientific research area.
The main uniqueness of the subjects delivered lies in addressing Food Studies from a holistic perspective, centred on the Humanities. History, Culture, Literature and Arts are the pillars of this humanist knowledge, in dialogue with the disciplinary perspectives of Tourism, Anthropology, Sociology, Communication and Medicine. All these areas are taken care by a fixed teaching staff and by national and foreign guest specialists.
The course is directed both at candidates who have not yet entered the professional market and for professionals linked, in particular, to the food, gastronomy, culture and tourism areas, and educational professionals who wish to value themselves and acquire knowledge and skills of the highest level of research and education.
Overall goal
The main goal of academic research developed within the course is to understand how individuals and societies, in the long duration of the historical process (from prehistory to the present), relate to food from the sociocultural, aesthetic, communicational, ethical, religious and medical points of view, in all its stages (production, distribution, transformation, consumption and its consequences at the socio-environmental and health levels). These universes of questioning seem indispensable to answer a set of key questions in contemporary discourses on Heritage, Gastronomy, Healthy & Sustainable Food, Health, Leisure & Well-Being.
Specific goals
- Provide in-depth knowledge on Food Heritage as an expression of multiculturalism and as identity markers open to change.
- Carry out research and application of knowledge to the academic and civil communities of scientific knowledge on the major dietary and culinary models that influence the modus vivendi of societies, formed from the relationship and openness to food practices in other countries.
- Demonstrate the relevance of Food Heritage in the context of the peoples’ cultural heritage of and their cultural manifestations.
- Promote the transfer of knowledge to the business and the civil communities, a dynamic necessary for economic development, knowledge and the enhancement of local and global heritage and identities.
- Development of collaborative actions and projects between the team of professors and PhD candidates of PACI, civil society, public or private institutions and the business sector.
For more information, see the page of the Faculty.