How do you get a PhD in a field nobody else has a PhD in?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

Ph.Ds are by their nature specialized, but they tend to group together into fields. Dr. Clutton calls it a “Ph.D in Gin” because it’s a simple phrase with some solid impact, but it’s more likely to really be a Ph.D in some sort of culinary field (Arts? History? I’m not really sure what the university that granted it would have been thinking) with a special concentration on gin. His Ph.D committee would included others who had specialized in winemaking, brewing and distilling, and so on: fields closely related to gin and potentially having a strong interest in gin, but not quite the same thing. These Ph.Ds judged his work to be their equal, even though his *very particular* field of study was a little different.