ESTER is an annual Research Design Course for economic and social historians on October 17th-21st 2011 at the University of Évora.

The RDC-course consists of a 3- to 4-day workshop of up to a maximum of 40 PhD-students in economic and social history.

The RDC course assists PhD-students in setting up a high quality and well-designed plan for their dissertation under the guidance of a team of leading senior researchers whose task is to provide comments and lead discussions. The course offers PhD-students help in sharpening and refining their research questions, in strengthening the focus of their research, in increasing the consistency of their overall dissertation plan, in making explicit the various theoretical and methodological choices that have to be made in the course of the project, and in improving the composition of the dissertation.