Curious about what you want to do after graduation?
Read the Word of Welcome from the Chair of the bacherlor's programme International Studies, Professor Giles Scott-Smith.
International Studies has started a new academic year, welcome to 2020-2021 everyone! This year we have about 540 new first year students, with 54 different nationalities! This number is similar to previous years, and that’s really something to be proud of in these Covid-19 uncertain times. Last Friday, on the 18th of September, we celebrated the Opening of the Academic Year a bit differently from past years, in that it was held both on-campus and online. Although we missed having a large crowd in the lecture hall, it was still a celebratory occasion!
Starting this semester, Things That Talk will venture into the BA International Studies program. ‘Things’ (be it objects, tools, or artifacts of everyday life) are the material expressions of the human experience, and therefore deserve a strong voice within our research and studies. This Faculty of Humanities-made platform is a place for learning the language of things. Their voices may corroborate, complement or challenge all the information that we consume through the written and spoken word. The main storytellers are students. This academic year, already more than twenty courses within our faculty will use Things That Talk to build a durable, living archive of stories that are of direct relevance to the courses!
Meet Roos ter Elst - she will be Student well-being counselor for International Studies. That means she'll be doing a lot of activities around students’ state of being and (online) community building. A very useful person to get to know, obviously! In this mini-interview she'll tell a bit more about herself.
Please meet Prof.dr. Maurits S. Berger, your new lecturer for the course "Introduction to International Studies". He is a lawyer and Arabist. He holds the Sultan of Oman chair of Islam and the West at Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) and is a senior research associate with the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague. He has worked as a lawyer in Amsterdam, and as a researcher and journalist in Cairo and Damascus. It's an honour to have him as a lecturer for International Studies!
During the 2020 graduation ceremony, 2019’s two Most Outstanding Students provided their Alumnus speech via video. Imogen Stevens and Karen Chica Gomez congratulated the new graduates on their achievement, and reflected on the past year as they have moved on from International Studies.
On this web page you will find a link to a cloud where all photos made by Leiden University during the graduation ceremony can be found and downloaded for personal usage.
The university’s largest consultancy programme, International Studies’ PRINS, has been connecting international employers with humanities students for six years. Founder Sarita Koendjbiharie: ‘Students of International Studies offer the holistic view that complex social issues need.’
Organised in four separate sessions throughout the day, and broadcast live online to guests and families who could not join, a total of 260 students received their Bachelor’s Diploma of International Studies on 28 August 2020 at the graduation ceremony in the historic Pieterskerk in Leiden.
