I don’t know why Australia is so far ahead of the curve in terms of treating metal as a legitimate academic subject, but it is. Over the course of the past eight years, four different Australian Universities have all sponsored psychological and/or sociological studies of extreme music.

And now a fifth, the University of New Castle, “is offering a PhD in the social geography of heavy metal culture,” according to Kerrang!. They’re even offering up three scholarships — two for Australian students, one for a student from abroad — to study the social geographies of not just metal, but also Homelessness and Mutual Aid, Veganism, and Unschooling and the Possibilities of Childhood (which Psychology Today tells me is “families where the children did not go to school and were not homeschooled in any curriculum-based way, but instead were allowed to take charge of their own education”). The scholarships will offer each student roughly $20K U.S. per year.

Apparently, those lucky students will have Simon Springer, Director of Human Geography at the University of Newcastle, to thank. Springer tells Kerrang! that the University gave him “free reign to recruit students to work in areas of personal interest, and as a life-long metal fan who has only recently started to do some work in the area of metal studies, I figured this would be a good conduit to further my research agenda in this area.”

If you’re interested, you can apply here. Personally, I just hope this means that Vince and I are on our way to getting some honorary degrees. You can’t even imagine how happy it would make my mother if I was Dr. Axl Rosenberg.