Writing under Wartime Conditions is a study into North and South Korean literature written during the Korean War.

If you really want to understand East Asia, you can't overlook Korea. At the Bachelor's programme Korean Studies at Leiden University you will discover a fascinating mix of age-old traditions and modern customs through intensively studying culture, history and language.

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.

The Master’s in Korean Studies at Leiden University offers specialised, in-depth study of the cultural and societal issues of pre-modern and modern Korea.

This dissertation is a study of North Korean art as a site where politics, history, and culture meet.

The Academic Language Center Leiden offers Korean language courses at various levels and customized Korean language training. The courses are practical in nature: focused on the use of the language. More information can be found here >

Choong-Yeol Kim defended his thesis on 14 November 2019

Christopher Green defended his thesis on 26 February 2020

What makes South Korean films successful? In the first part of the video series 'The World of the Korean Wave', University Lecturer Peter Verstraten discusses the recent success of South Korean cinema.

The major objective of the study is to ascertain how Japanese colonialism affected the manner in which food was produced, processed, prepared and consumed in the colony, and how new attitudes towards these practices were constructed.

SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM: Locating Responsibility for Forced Expatriate Labour Practices by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

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

Korea specialist Koen De Ceuster has combined 1200 posters from North Korea in one database. He believes the posters are extremely valuable for researchers who want to make a more in-depth study of this closed country. The database will be launched on 15 June in Leiden.

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

Xiao Ma defended her thesis on 26 September 2018

Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production

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

The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1915)

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).

On Wednesday 14 February 2024 Yorum Beekman successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This series of publications brings together new material on wellconsidered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies.

This project examines changes in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of the legendary twelfth-century general Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189) and how they reflect not only developments in themes of representation, but also changes in the focus of early modern and modern Japan’s…

Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

On 1 September 2022 Afke van Ewijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The research group Politics, Culture and National Identities 1789-present investigates a wide range of national political cultures in Europe and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of only analyzing high politics (the acts of governments and political parties), the research group focuses…

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.

During the master’s programme in Modern Dutch Literature at Leiden University you will learn to scientifically analyse literary texts, as well as other Dutch cultural texts, such as those found in hiphop songs and diaries.

In Modern Languages specialisation you will explore the structure, acquisition, history and use of one or more of these five languages in depth: Chinese, English, French, German or Italian.

The master's programme in Modern European Philosophy at Leiden University focuses on the philosophical reflection on human nature and culture, both from a systematic and a historical perspective.

This research network aims to promote cross-regional collaboration in the field of cultural history in early modern Asia at the intersections of visual, material, textual and aural culture.

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

This project focuses on the study of Neanderthal and early modern human behavior, primarily on the basis of stone tools, fauna and spatial patterns

The ‘Locke drawings’ collection and the representation of Brazilian native peoples in global perspective

How are new drugs developed? This question is central to the Minor Modern Drug Discovery (MDD), which covers the entire trajectory from disease to drug molecule and vice versa. The various research groups involved offer a complementary and interdisciplinary perspective by connecting the diverse subjects…