The Environmental Humanities are an interdisciplinary field of research that foregrounds the indispensable contribution of the humanities, social sciences, and economic sciences—beyond the natural sciences and engineering—to the study of the environmental and climate crisis. As anthropogenic environmental damage and the side effects of a reflexive modernity (Ulrich Beck) have become increasingly unmanageable, as planetary boundaries have been reached and in some cases already exceeded, there is a need for a critical analysis of processes of change and for a re-thinking of the environment toward genuine sustainability, one that centrally includes questions of social inequality and environmental justice. The central research question of the ecological transformation of society will be explored through three core areas:

I. Transformation of established disciplines and cultures of knowledge – opportunities and challenges of inter- and transdisciplinarity arising from an environmentally focused reorientation of the participating disciplines.

II. Transformation as a subject of the Environmental Humanities – reflection on and analysis of existing, competing concepts and discourses of transformation, as well as case studies of countries or regions in which ecological transformations have taken place and are taking place.

III. Ecological knowledge and transformative practice – relationships between science and socio-cultural practice as a specific added value of the doctoral program.

The joint International Doctoral College of the University of Augsburg and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München has been funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria (ENB) since 2021 and has recently entered its second four-year funding phase (2025–29). The new speakers of the program are Prof. Dr. Simone Müller (Augsburg) and Prof. Dr. Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich). The new cohort consists of 12 international PhD students, of whom 7 are affiliated with the University of Augsburg and 5 with the LMU Munich. The ENB also funds a coordinator (PD Dr. Twelbeck) and a postdoc position (Dr. Pieper).