The MA in History, Arts and Culture of Asia is designed for students interested in taking a humanities-related approach to the study of countries or regions in pre-modern, modern or contemporary Asia.

How do ideas concerning the academic study of religion relate to the socio-cultural and political context in which they are developed?

The bachelor’s in South and Southeast Asian Studies is a unique multidisciplinary programme that integrates the culture, religion, history, sociology, economics and politics of the region. As a student, you can choose to study Hindi, Sanskrit, Tibetan or Indonesian.

Research in the field of Etruscology at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University (UL; the Netherlands) aims at exploring the history of the religious and ideological mentality of the Etruscans by studying archaeological, epigraphical and ancient written sources.

Staff members, alumni, and students were greeted by a warm spring day to follow the various programmes during the reunion and career day of BA South and Southeast Asian Studies. From alumni panels and yoga session to informal activities such as board games.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

To promote a sustainable partnership with Asia, it is important to gain a better understanding of each other in economic, socio-cultural, historical, and legal terms. For decades, scholars from Leiden have made a significant contribution to the acquisition of knowledge about both the present and the…

This research programme encourages the analysis of nascent Islam within the framework of religious studies.

The main research objective is to map the cities of Roman Asia Minor in terms of location, size, urban amenities and juridical status, with the specific aim to understand the reasons how this urban settlement pattern arose.

Markus Davidsen defended his thesis on 16 October 2014

In this region researchers at LUCL have specific expertise in studying Austronesian and Papuan languages. China is another important region where Leiden linguists conduct research.

Islam is a religion as well as a cultural practice that takes on a diversity of forms, some of them contradictory. This has always been the case, and it is becoming increasingly apparant in the modern world through migration, globalisation and the digitial media. The minor Islam: Religion and Society,…

Provides a cutting-edge comparative political economy analysis of welfare and inequality across ten East Asian countries.

This monograph by Robert Ross provides a detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century.

Religion is everywhere. Knowledge of religion is essential for anyone who wants to understand the world. If you are fascinated by the diversity of religions, their development throughout history and their meaning today – both in people’s personal lives and in society – the minor Religion in a Changing…

In this article, published in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia Online, Erik de Maaker posed three questions. How can the persistence of the community religion, albeit marginalized, be explained? What role is left for the practices, objects, and beliefs associated…

LIAS aims to advance the globally conscious vision of area studies, both within and outside the academic community. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, the institute is a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas.

Call for Papers for the conference Relocating Governance in Asia: state and society in South- and Southeast Asia, c. 1800-2000, Leiden University, 22-24 January 2020.

How is tradition constructed and belief made plausible in fiction-based religion?

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion?

The |0100| Project studies the discourses, practices and imaginaries of Islamic information society’s most debated component- Artificial Intelligence- using multimodal and mixed methods and comparing and contrasting narratives and imagery of AI-religious-futures in Muslim Southeast Asia.

Our East Asia experts work across various disciplines on global issues such as migration, heritage, and colonialism.

Proceedings of the International Colloquium Leiden, May 29 and 30, 2008

What are the foundations of the regulation of blasphemy, and in which manner, in legal as well as in extra-legal terms, has blasphemy developed over the last decades?

The Central Asia Initiative is funded by the Leiden research profile area Asian Modernities and Traditions with the purpose to establish Central Asian Studies at Leiden University.

Cultural Anthropologist Erik de Maaker published, together with Monica Janoswki (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia in Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS).

Kathryn Emerson defended her thesis on 28 June 2016

How does the commodification and re-appreciation of the contiguous uplands of Northeast India, Bangladesh and Burma/Myanmar transform the relationship between these states and their upland citizens?

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of West Asia, deepening your understanding of this region’s fascinating past.

Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) studies religion as human activity, in all its diversity.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Science with the University of Pretoria.

From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Early Urban Societies

Lecture, Research Seminar

Dissochaeta Blume (Melastomataceae, tribe Dissochaeteae) is well-known as a scrambling plant genus found in Southeast Asia, where it is an inhabitant of the tropical rainforests or evergreen forests.

Cwiertka wants to investigate how waste is produced and disposed of in modern East Asian society. With her research group she will be carrying out a comparative analysis on two levels: the international level (between China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and the inter-regional level (between East Asia…

GLOBALINT is a pioneering study of intelligence in the Global South. It asks ‘how do (un)democratic shifts in political governance impact intelligence services in contexts of violent conflict?

The economic history of Soviet development practices in Central Asia remains controversial and dominated by the view that Soviet development policy was wasteful and inefficient in the periphery. Challenging the established view of Soviet largesse and largely undirected and untracked “subsidies” to…