Sander Bax is a professor at the Centre for the Arts in Society.

Otto Boele is a Senior University Lecturer with expertise on Russian literature, film and popular culture. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, he serves a wider audience through lectures, film reviews and podcasts (for instance the Home Academy), often with a historical dimension.

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is Associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Dorine Schellens is a cultural historian with expertise on contemporary Russian and German literature and culture. In addition, since Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, she has been actively advocating for students and scholars who are at risk or have fled as a result of Russia's war or political…

Geert Onno Prins is an external PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Annelies Schulte Nordholt is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Céline Zaepffel is a Lecturer in French literature and culture. Her research focuses on the transmission of ideologies through modern children's literature and culture, based on an intermedial and sociological analysis of children's media and the historical and cultural context of their publication.…

Emma Grootveld is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Esther Edelmann is a University Lecturer in modern and contemporary literature. Her teaching and research activities focus on the intersections between literature and law, literature and political economy, and culture and environmental humanities. She teaches in literature programs, International Studies,…

Judith Bosnak is a lecturer and researcher in the field of Indonesian Languages and Cultures at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Renske Janssen is a postdoctoral researcher in Classics and Ancient History. She has a particular interest in Roman law and administration, as well as religion in the Roman world.

Yinzhi Zhang is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Gabrielle van den Berg is Professor of Cultural History of Central Asia and Iran at Leiden University. She teaches courses on the cultural history of Central Asia and Iran. In 2016, she received an NWO VICI grant for her project

The Middle East has a rich literary tradition, which is steadily gaining a foothold in the West. Modern literary works deal with contemporary issues, such as the legacy of colonialism, the struggles between traditionalism and modernity, the place of women in society and the war in Israel/Palestine.

Frans Willem Korsten is a Professor Literature, Culture and Law at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Yiorgos Evgenios Douliakas is a lecturer at the Centre for the Arts in Society

Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University with a main interest in contemporary Arabic visual culture and literature. She has worked mainly on cities & urban imaginaries and memory & temporality.

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to American poet Louise Glück (1942-). This means the Nobel committee passed by authors like Anne Carson, Jamaica Kincaid en Maryse Condé, many of whom were tipped by academics and literary critics as being strong contenders for the prize in 2020.…

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah. The Swedish Academy praises Gurnah's "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". The works in the reading…

Peter Webb is University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. He specialises in early Arabic poetry and prose, combining philology, literary analysis, and anthropological approaches to examine how poetic, narrative, and historiographical traditions shaped…

After large scale protests in the United States following police violence against black American citizens, racism in the Netherlands, too, is once again being widely debated. This renewed and intensified interest in the problems surrounding racism is prompting many to (re)read important works by black…