Til about Dr David Clutton who’s the only person with PhD in Gin, however stupid that sounds.
How do you get a phd in a discipline where there’s no-one to grant you that phd? How was it done in the past?
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A PhD is formally granted by a faculty/department/school within a college or university. As such, it’s most generally labeled as “in” whatever field that faculty/department/school studies You may then have some leeway to specify what particular subfield you focused on, so someone who got their PhD from a History department could say something like “I have a PhD in American History” without much controversy. I suspect that Clutton is doing a more extreme form of this and got his degree from a conventional department (e.g. Chemistry) but refers to it as a “PhD in Gin” because that was his focus. It’s tough to say for sure, because it doesn’t seem like his CV is public information.
People *do* get PhDs in new fields, though they’re rarely the only person with that sort of PhD for long. This is a consequence of universities establishing new faculties/departments/schools to study emerging topics. For an obvious example, there were no Cinema Studies departments 150 years ago, and now there are many. They were started by gathering together professors in related fields and experts without PhDs. Once a new department is established, it can start granting PhDs in the field. The first person to earn such a PhD would be the unicorn you’re seeking.
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