Guidelines pertaining to the application assessment process for doctoral research fellowships at the Faculty of Humanities

Area of application

These guidelines apply to all doctoral research fellowships:

1. Fellowships connected to a specific academic field, project or unit, advertised by an academic department/centre or several of these working in co-operation.
2. Externally funded research fellowships.

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• All fellowships that will be held for more than one year must be advertised publicly. The advertisement must conform to the designated template. The content of the advertisement must be sent to the Faculty’s Appointment Board (Norwegian) for approval.
• The content of advertisements of externally funded fellowships are approved of the Department Board without review by the Faculty’s Appointment Board.

Application

• Applications are to be submitted to the Faculty of Humanities according to instructions stated in the advertisement.
• Applications that do not comply with these requirements will be rejected without further processing.

Project description

• The project description must be formulated in keeping with the Faculty’s guidelines and must not exceed 14 000 characters (including footnotes and spaces).
• The project description may be written in Norwegian (or Danish or Swedish) or English.

Admission requirements

• The objective of the research fellowship is to support the candidate in completing the research training programme that culminates in conferral of the Ph.D. degree. Only those admitted to the Ph.D. programme are eligible to receive a research fellowship.
• To be eligible for admission to the Ph.D. programme at the University of Oslo, applicants must have at least a five-year basic education (master’s degree or the equivalent) or equivalent education that the relevant Faculty has approved as a basis for admission. In special cases, the Faculty may grant admission on the basis of a one-year master’s degree following an assessment of the study programme’s scope and quality.
• The requirements for the master’s degree (or equivalent) must be completed and, as a rule, the final evaluation results must be available at the time of application.
• Admission of a candidate implies that the programme has the necessary supervisory expertise and capacity in the field in which the candidate wishes to write his or her dissertation.                  

Committee

• An assessment committee comprised of three persons is appointed.
• The committee must have the following representation:
  1. At least two experts with competency in the academic field to which the fellowship is connected. If the fellowship is connected to a project, a project manager or other co-ordinator for the project must be appointed.
  2. The head of department/head of research or a person designated as his or her representative.
• If possible, both genders are to be represented on the committee.
• When a fellowship could be placed under several departments or centres, the relevant heads of department/heads of research must co-operate on appointing a committee comprised of at least one member from each of the departments concerned.

Assessment of applications

• Applications are assessed in relation to the following criteria:
  • Suitability: The applicant’s academic background and marks, study progression, time passed since the final examination, and relevant academic activity.
  • The applicants’s ability to complete research training
  • Good collaboration skills and an ability to join inter-disciplinary academic communities
  • The project’s scientific merit, research-related relevance and innovation
• The Committe may obtain academic assesments by experts outside the committee.
• The assessments are exempt from public access and are not sent to the applicant.

Selection and appointment

• The committee writes a recommendation using the designated template for nominations. The committee ranks the best applicants and provides an explanation of its reasoning.
• The assessment committee will conduct interviews and reference interviews.
• The assessments are exempt from public access and are not sent to the applicant.
• The committee’s recommendation is deliberated by the Department Board, which approves the recommendation.
• The recommendation is then sent to the Faculty’s appointment committee, which is responsible for final approval of appointments to research fellowships.
• The final decision on appointments is made public in the minutes of the meeting of the Faculty’s Appointment Board and are informed by a letter to the applicants.
• For appointment to externally funded fellowships, the final approval of appointment is delegated to the Department Board.

Offers of employment

The Head of the Department will offer a fellowship in accordance with the decision made in the Facultys Appointment Board/The Department board.