Station ident

Free to air, every defense we can find

A calendar of PhD defenses that universities livestream for free, and an archive of the recordings that stay online.

  • 22Institutions on the dial
  • €0Subscription fee

In the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and elsewhere a PhD defense is a public ceremony, and most universities kept the livestream running after 2020. The listings are scattered across dozens of agenda pages. PhD TV gathers them in one place and shows them in your local time. There is a calendar feed you can subscribe to.

Where the listings come from

Every listing is taken from the university’s own public agenda page, and every defense page links to the exact page it came from. At the moment each record is entered by hand by the maintainer after checking that page. Submissions and automated scrapers are planned; whichever way a listing arrives, it is reviewed before it is published.

Your own defense

If your defense is listed here, open its page and choose “This is my defense”. A curator checks the claim — that is all it is until then, a request — and once they agree, the feature page about your defense is yours to write: the layout, the opening paragraph, a pull quote, and the three questions every feature page asks. Each version is read before it goes up, and what is already published stays up meanwhile.

If it is not listed, send it in. Anyone may send a defense in — a supervisor, a colleague, the press office — but a candidate who does is asked those same three questions on the way, so the page is written before the listing exists.

Corrections and removals

Candidates’ names and thesis titles come from public university agendas. If you are listed and would rather not be, say so and the listing comes down. The same goes for a wrong time, a dead stream link, or a recording that has since been taken offline.

Channel line-up22 stations

Pictures

Where the pictures come from

A defense shows its own picture when it has one, otherwise its university's, otherwise a plate from its field. Everything here is in the public domain or used under a Creative Commons licence, and every picture is cropped and toned for the page.

Contact

PhD TV is made and maintained by Nikolaos Batalas. To send a defense in, use the submission form: it asks a few questions, and if the defense is your own it offers you the feature page that goes with the listing. To correct a listing or ask for one to be taken down, write to nikolaos.batalas@gmail.com.