A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

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.

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…

Lecture

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

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…

The Modern Devotion: pone of the most influential religious initiatives in the late medieval Low Countries.

A Biography of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822–1914)

Turkic nomadic rulers established large empires in the Middle East and Asia between the 11th and 14th centuries. This project will explore the link between their political ideology and the production of art and literature, via the cultural heritage of five cities along the Silk Road: Kashgar, Samarkand,…

This dissertation studies the formation of the wage laboring class in the Iranian oil industry during the first decades of the 20th century.

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.

This PhD research sets out to unravel and explain the socio-structural and cultural impacts of oil-industrialization on the local Bakhtiari community in general and the industrial laborers it provided in specific.

Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations.

This book bij Hasan Çolak is based on rigorous research on unpublished and unexplored Ottoman correspondence between the Ottoman central administration and the Eastern Patriarchates, published Greek patriarchal documents, and French missionary and diplomatic sources.

Confucianism has been a major force in the cultural history of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam for thousands of years, affecting the art, literature, science and politics of all these countries.

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern.

The narrow but long stretched stript of Frisian land along the North Sea was already occupied before Roman times. However, man repeatedly suffered setbacks when he tried to extend his living space, both in the tidal marshes and the peat area south of them.

This edited volume provides a synthesis on the question of business attitudes towards and its influence over the development of the modern welfare state. It gathers leading scholars in the field to offer both in-depth historical country case studies and comparative chapters that discuss contemporary…

On the 28th of October Hein van der Bruggen successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Jews and Christians in the Middle East

The research profile ‘Asian Modernities and Traditions’ (AMT) aims to raise the strength and visibility of research, teaching and dissemination on Asian studies at Leiden University.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

From the mid-19th century until the 1970’s, the Middle East witnessed the presence of various European missionaries who played a fundamental role in the birth and the development of humanitarianism. Since these Christian missionaries were well integrated in the local Middle Eastern societies via their…

Impressions by Wouter Baas and Caroline Schep

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

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…

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

Humanities, Institute for Area Studies

The Iseum Campense, the impressive sanctuary for Isis and the Egyptian gods on the Campus Martius and arguably one of ancient Rome’s most notable absent presences, is a monument central to various debates.

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

This research investigates everyday lives and workplace experiences of Iranian workers employed at textile industry, which was the second biggest industry after oil following the latter’s discovery in 1908.

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

Lecture

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).

The project re-examines the role of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries in the cultural and social developments of the Middle East and their interactions with the indigenous communities, from the nineteenth century until today. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’…

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).

This is the first reference work to describe the history of embroidery throughout Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent from the medieval period through to the present. It offers an authoritative guide to all the major embroidery traditions of the region and a detailed examination…

Leiden University’s Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies programme is a one-year, full-time Master’s programme that is taught completely in English. Building on a tradition of more than four centuries of studying the Middle East, we offer highly relevant and up to date insights into a wide variety of…

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

The project ‘Between the Holy Land and the World’ proposes a connected history of the Christian communities in the Near East (1900-1948) by means of a study of unpublished Franciscan and Dominican photographic collections.

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

Choong-Yeol Kim defended his thesis on 14 November 2019

This volume, edited by Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen, discusses practices of memory in early modern Europe.

This book project explores the changing dynamics of marriage and family life in postwar Japan based on an examination of the life histories of single mothers.

- Case study of the Hungarian Archaeological Mission in Abdallah Nirqi in 1964 –