In this mini course I am going to introduce the Dirac equation (describing fermions) in Minkowski spacetime and explain how to extend the equation to curved spacetimes (Lecture 1). In Lecture 2, I will introduce the canonical quantisation of the Dirac field in Minkowski spacetime and describe the problem of time-dependent external fields in the canonical quantisation formalism. In Lecture 3, I will present a proposal of myself and Felix Finster addressing the problem of time-dependent external fields and spacetimes, based on the fermionic signature operator.