This study by artist Jonas Staal explores the development of propaganda art from the 20th to the 21st century.

How can the concept of Critical Making be expanded into a general approach that ties the critical methodology of artistic research, and the established concepts of artistic autonomy, together with contemporary creative-technological development?

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.

The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) of Leiden University and Art Institute West Den Haag are pleased to announce their close collaboration in the second season of the public series In the Making. This series, dedicated to the practice of research in the arts, will consist of seven public…

Sophie Ernst’s doctoral thesis is an artist’s contribution to media art theory.

Protestant missionaries have provided the earliest and most detailed sources regarding the ritual art of the Papuan peoples of the Geelvink Bay.

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is one of the few research institutes in the world in which researchers in the field of literature, art, architecture, design and media studies come together to conduct research into the cultural production of the western world, from classical…

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.

How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices.

This book examines how renewed forms of artistic activism were developed in the wake of the neoliberal repression since the 1980s.

Questions of justice are not only the concern of legal professionals, politicians and activists, they also permeate culture at large. Literature, Cinema, Music and Artworks often revolve around questions about rights, justice and fairness, raising a wide range of issues, such as: how do we understand…

April 10 at 7 pm - April 12 at 8 pm

To what extent and in what manner can experimental video be used to reclaim the capacity for telling one’s own story, on one's own terms, speaking in tongues outside the linguistic framework of immune system discourse?

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

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

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

Subproject of

Leiden University College The Hague: Liberal Arts & Sciences, Global Challenges.

This project involves research into the oeuvre of the Sundanese sculptor Iko, who has worked for the Catholic mission in Java and has carved sculptures for a chapel and church in Ganjuran. The images were designed by the Catholic layman Jos Schmutzer and are characterized by a fusion in style and symbolism…

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

Digitally Preserving Heritage at Risk

On 25 Februarry 2021 Hart Bloomsbury brings out a monograph by Frans-Willem Korsten: Arts as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption. Its working title was 'Annoyance' but that did not sell. A sign in itself; most struggles for justice have been considered as annoying.

Subproject of

To what extent can literary strategies deepen and enhance research in and through the visual and performing arts, as well as for research in academia?

This project investigates memorisation strategies that were employed in the fields of painting and calligraphy in imperial China, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media is dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, demonstrating the ways in which such archival artworks probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do.

Wrenching poverty, global inequality, violent political and ethnic strife, deadlocked, unresponsive or even collapsing governments, growing dissatisfaction with democracy and missed opportunities for innovation – these are merely some of the challenges of governance and development with which our programme…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

The Benelux Association for the Study of Art, Culture, and the Environment (BASCE) is a platform for all those who are actively engaged in ecocriticism to discuss their various endeavours with peers from different disciplines and an array of intellectual, creative, or activist pursuits.

This dissertation deals with Hegel’s theory of the sublime (das Erhabene). I focus specifically on die heilige Poesie (sacred poetry), a form of art that he identifies with the Judaic Psalms and which I claim to be the core of Hegel’s approach to sublimity. I claim that Hegel’s apparent lack of interest…

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

At the start of the 20th century there were fewer than 2 billion people. Now at over 7 billion, Earth’s population is on target to reach 8 billion by 2027. How has this dramatic increase in human population impacted Earth’s life support systems and natural resources? How should we understand the meaning…

Although the world has made tremendous progress in health, education, sanitation and hygiene, global public health challenges still exist. Disparities in health exist between and within nations as evidenced by inequalities in disease burden, mortality, nutrition and environmental well-being. How does…

Home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, The Hague is the perfect backdrop to explore conceptions of justice in our global society. Questions of human rights, peace, security and the environment present legal and policy challenges for governmental and non-governmental…

The eighth issue of the JLGC explores the diverse and interdisciplinary research on our multifaceted relationship with animals which is currently taking place, re-examining the relationship between humans and animals, and the definitions involved.

The first of the two volumes of this co-authored study has just been published by Metzler. The study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity.

Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild responds to a contemporary political climate in which historically invested figures of otherness—barbarians, savages, monsters—have become common discursive currency.

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

Ms. Monica Klasing Chen defended her thesis on 16 December 2020

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

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

On the 22nd of April, Liszt Vianna Neto successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Liszt Vianna Neto on this achievement.

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

In this latest contribution to mimetic studies, Nidesh Lawtoo joins forces with leading international theorists of the posthuman to broaden the reach of the mimetic turn beyond human imitation.

The ARTIVES project studies imaginaries of diversity portrayed by artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam in their films, performances and (oral) literature with the aim to explore their transgressive potential of opening up possibilities of thinking differently about migration-related diversity. Their stories…

Dina Ishak Bakhoum defended her thesis on 21 January 2021

'The Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia' explores the nature and implications of civil society across the region, engaging systematically with both theoretical approaches and empirical nuance for a systematic, comparative, and informative approach.