How are contemporary art practices from Southeast Asia negotiating notions of art and tradition?

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

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular…

Engagement between Asia and Europe is increasing. If these continents want to build a lasting relationship, they need to understand each other better in the economic, socio-cultural, historical and legal arena. Researchers from Leiden have already contributed to the body of knowledge on past and present…

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

The MA in Politics, Society and Economy of Asia takes a social science approach to the study of one or more countries or regions in modern or contemporary Asia.

How has the digital helped to articulate everyday life concerns of common Southeast Asians in all its sheer diversity?

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

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…

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.

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.

Kathryn Emerson defended her thesis on 28 June 2016

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.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

Lecture, Leiden University Nationalism Network

Many people in Asia and the West are attracted to Buddhism. This is because of this religion’s ‘image’ of being exotic and authentic.

From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Early Urban Societies

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

Religion and ethnicity are inextricably linked in discourse within and about Central Asia. One common narrative suggests that as a result of differences between historically sedentary and nomadic populations, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks are naturally more religious and more likely to radicalise than their…

Home to a rapidly rising superpower and the two largest economies in the world after the US, a global East Asia is seen and felt everywhere. This dynamic text views the global square from the perspective of the world’s most important rising global center.

The CADS Asia Research Cluster extends the legacy of the Institute’s Asia focus into the future, as an important hub in international networks on the study of Asia and through active engagement with colleagues in Asia. Within the Institute the Asia Research Cluster offers a platform for anthropologists…

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Digital Activism’ by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and…

How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities…

The ACE-network consists of heritage and research organizations from 10 countries which aim to promote contemporary archaeology at a European wide level, by emphasizing its cultural, scientific, and economic dimensions, including its manifold interest for the wider public.

SEAtrans: an interdisciplinary research project that aims at studying the dynamics and processes of transitions in society-nature interactions in Southeast Asian societies.

Balsaminaceae is a diverse plant family characterized by a huge floral morphological diversity.

Volume 4 and 5 of the Leiden series 'Dutch Sources on South Asia' are now available, written by Markus Vink (vol.4) and Carolien Stolte (vol.5).

Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy.

Investigation of 1.) The whereabouts of the epistemological dissonances in art criticisms on Post-war contemporary art from Japan between two different language realms, in this case in English and Japanese; and 2.) What the dissonances disclose, disturb, and contribute in the process of the establishment…

How to understand the simultaneously dis- and reappearance of letters in contemporary culture, and how does this Neo-Epistolarity relate to media-technological change?

This project proposes to connect two discourses highly present in contemporary literary criticism in China, as well as on the world literary scene and academic circles: the discussion on emigration literature and the concept of ‘essayness’ derived mainly from (post)modern Western theories of the ess…

Much has been said regarding the global flows of information that are characteristic of modernity; it has been frequently stressed that these conduits are so deeply embedded that local or national environments may be imagined as having a global span. Thus, while we are now well aware that the imagination…

This programme examines cultural space, national identity and the politics of tangible and intangible heritage in Islamic Central Asia.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections between a variety of artistic and cultural expressions and their role in society from 1800 onwards.

Subproject of

Research how ‘custom’, ‘traditions’ and ‘heritages’ take on new meanings in the uplands of South and (mainland) Southeast Asia.

A brief review essay on some of the work that has been recently published in the emergent field of digital ethnography.

Drawing on the analogical lessons of the Great War, this article uses applied history to analyze how the four parallels discerned can help us make sense of contemporary Sino-American rivalry

For several years, contemporary composed music has been critiqued among others by funds, sponsors, and festival organizers for having lost contact with their audiences. This music has increasingly become a pursuit of a privileged, well-situated, and higher educated public, and is most often confined…

Xiao Ma defended her thesis on 26 September 2018

What is the role of memory in contemporary music?

Andrea Giolai defended his thesis on 3 May 2017.

This project embarks on empirical analysis of popular psycho-physical practices in contemporary Korea.

The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is devoted to the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present time in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

How does contemporary art and culture represent nuclear contamination in post-nuclear landscapes?

The Issues beneath the Surface

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resista…