Find out how to apply for East Asian Studies at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.

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.

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

Lecture, Descriptive Linguistics Seminars

On 27 November 2018, the Center for Legal and Comparative Studies of the East African Community of Leiden University (LEAC) is organizing, in close cooperation with Strathmore University Law School, the University of Nairobi Law School and the IRID, the Fourth LEAC Conference on the topic “Teaching…

The researchers in the World Archaeology department of the Faculty of Archaeology concentrate on a range of different periods and regions: from humanity’s origins to the Middle Ages and the modern age, and from Asia to South America.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden Law School with the University of Dar es Salaam.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden Law School with three universities in Kenya.

In Uprooting the Diaspora, Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish…

Abrupt Climate Change and Cultural Transformation

This dissertation, Layered Loyalties: The Natuurkundige Commissie in the Netherlands Indies (1820-1850), studies the Natuurkundige Commissie.

How did free agents cooperate with the VOC and the WIC, through lobbying for private interests within the Companies as well as at the highest political levels?

The archaeology of Afro-Eurasian networks across land and sea (1st millennium CE)

Language offers new insights into our history, cultural differences, migration, and the way in which our brain processes information. This knowledge can in turn help us understand what it means to be human, as well as opening the way to many practical applications. In order to realise these goals, linguists…

This book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial…

The research addresses the question of “what is the impact of geopolitical changes to the pivot states in the Middle East? With special focus on Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.”

The new Middle Eastern Library (MEL) will bring together the UBL's own Middle Eastern collections and the collections of the library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), which has been part of the Leiden University Libraries since 1st January 2018.

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.

Report on the Excavations of the University of Amsterdam (1988) and the National Museum of Antiquities Leiden (1991-1993) in Syria.

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.

Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence, and Environment, vol.16. Edited by Noriyuki Shirai.

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (the NVIC) was founded in 1971. Nine universities in the Netherlands and Flanders participate in the institute with an aim to stimulating internationalisation of their teaching and research activities in the Middle East.

Do you want to discover a language and culture that is completely different from the Netherlands? In the Bachelor's programme Middle Eastern Studies you will study the connections between the different cultures in the Middle-East in the past and present. You will be able to choose from the languages…

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

What is it like to study International Studies in The Hague? Read how Stijn, student of International Studies, spends his day on average.

The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world.

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

The Iraqi archaeological site of Nimrud was recently recaptured from IS. The site has been severely damaged. The question now is, what to do with it? Should it be restored? Bleda Düring spoke with Trouw about this complex issue.

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…

The Case of the Painted Plaster

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo is an academic centre providing services for scholars and students from the supporting universities.

Understanding the history of Islam and Muslim societies sheds a clear light on the complex and changing social structures of the Middle East, including the current trouble spots whose effect spreads all the way to Western Europe.

This is the Board of Advisors of CompaRe.