In ancient times, the steppe in the hinterland of Petra (Jordan) was transformed into a green oasis. This project tries to shed insights in the agricultural, water management and societal processes resulting in this transformation. This will be accomplished by practicing an interdisciplinary research…

Conference

Rising geopolitical tensions are causing states and national elites to innovate their use of the past for present-day political ends. This is certainly true for the People’s Republic of China, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024 amid mounting superpower rivalry, ideological tensions with the…

PhD

LIAS is comprised of three research schools with expertise in different areas:

This thesis investigates the historical development of Japanese pitch accent.

The MultiGreen project is a collaboration with NWO and CAS. The partners from the Dutch NWO side are the University of Leiden and University Wageningen. The partner from the Chinese CAS is the Institute of Urban Environment and the Institute of Geographic Sciences.

Are you thinking about studying the 2-year Asian Studies programme? Learn more and watch this short programme presentation!

Do you have a question about studying at Leiden University or student life in Leiden? Do you want more information about the Asian Studies master's programme? Chat with a current student for answers to your questions!

This project proposes an integrated and comparative study on the syntactic, semantic, prosodic and processing aspects of in-situ wh-questions, taking the Grammar-parser correspondence hypothesis (Phillips 1996, 2003) as a guiding principle.

Cody Bahir defended his thesis on 1 June 2017.

Welcome to the Graduate School of the Faculty of Humanities.

In-use stocks of products can be considered as intermediaries between human needs and the physical world.

The specialisation in Modern Languages explores the structure, acquisition, history and use of five languages.

On the 17th of December, Jin Wang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jin on this achievement!

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

How did institutions and structures operate throughout the Muslim world from the earliest history of Islam into the early modern period?

This research will investigate which aspects of On the sublime received attention in the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century and how the sublime found its way in the political and artistic discourse of that time. Thus I aim to shed light on the role of art in politics and society in this…

The Editors of PAIR are always interested in suggestions for themed editions. Anyone wishing to propose a theme and/or to assist as a ‘guest editor’ should contact one of the editors of PAIR.

This NWO-funded VICI project (2025-2030) led by Prof.dr. Petra M. Sijpesteijn examines the place-making processes in the early Islamic Empire.

How does global change across time and space lead to convergence and loss of variation or increasing diversity and conflict?

A platform to research memory and culture in the Muslim world. This programme explores the ways modern memory studies methodologies can be applied to pre-modern Muslim societies to reveal the uses of the past and senses of tradition in diverse contexts of Muslim thought.

As a critical commemoration of its centenary, this book presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey.

Sacrificing yourself for the greater good: in China, martyrdom and hero worship have been strongly encouraged by the Communist Party for the past decade or so. University lecturer Vincent Chang tells us more about this far-reaching development.

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.

No matter how hard Chinese communists tried to control the economy, they could not stop the free market from flourishing. This was the message given by historian Frank Dikötter on 7 February during a lecture on the Cultural Revolution. He will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate on 8 February.

On 24 juni 2021, Jing Zhang defended his thesis 'The Rationale of Publicity in the Law of Corporeal Movables and Claims'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. H.J. Snijders and J.A. van der Weide.

If you have a question, there are various ways to get in touch with us.

The NWO-funded Vidi project “American foreign policy and liberalism” challenges the idea that the United States has created and sustained a “liberal international order” since World War II. It instead explores the ways in which illiberal ideologies – such as those underpinning racial hierarchy at home…

Qinxin He is an education and research staff member and a PhD candidate at the Institute for Area Studies.

Zheyu Shang is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Area Studies.

Milan Ismangil is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Zhaole Yang is a University Lecturer of Chinese language and language pedagogy at the Institute for Area Studies.

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series