Politics and Aesthetics is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

The key questions posed in this dissertation centre on the interaction between spectator and artwork. What happens between a spectator and an artwork? How do we experience ‘meaning’ in an artwork? How may the process of interpretation be understood and articulated?

In Shimmering Images, Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change.

This research hopes to contribute to social awareness of the consequences of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples, to the deconstruction of still existing colonial and discriminatory notions and to a better appreciation of Indigenous art and thought.

Bahar Şimşek defended her thesis on 4 May 2021.

Chapter by Fabio Cristiano and Emilio Distretti for the volume The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self, edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, and Peter Sarram for Palgrave Macmillan.

On 30 January 2024 Jurre van der Meer successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This proposed research uses ego-documents from visual artists that were not intended for publication to reassess the scholarly debate on the demise of the Russian Avant-garde aesthetic in the twenties and early thirties of the 20th century.

My research focuses on theories of the sublime by the Berlin Enlightenment philosophers Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) and Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–79).

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

The aim of this project is to study what makes an act or form of violence a specifically political reality.

Lecture

The center studies the many ways in which issues of law and justice are dealt with in art and literature with a focus on liminal issues and cases. These are issues and cases where law comes to the limits of what it is capable of dealing with and art and literature explore the implications of what is…

In this dissertation Itandehui Jansen examines the ‘Voice’ of the filmmaker from a political and aesthetic perspective.

The fragmentary is everywhere: we encounter fragments in social media (Tiktok, Twitter), in personal memories from our childhood, and in traditions from our cultural heritage.

How can artist PhD candidates research their own work? They need to be good at switching from maker to critical observer and their research has to have a solid theoretical basis. This is the premise of Professor Janneke Wesseling. The aesthetic value of their work also has to be up for discussion. Inaugural…

Çağlar Köseoğlu, MA student Literary Studies, has received the Fulbright Graduate Student Grant intended for students who want to study for a master’s degree or a PhD in the United States. He will do a one-year MA called Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts.

Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality.

Larissa Mendoza Straffon and colleagues investigated visual attentional biases toward self-made artworks, which tend to be favoured, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. Their findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made…

This network brings together scholars whose work explores how contemporary frameworks of crisis produce experiences of the present, rehash or disrupt established narratives of the past, and broker specific outlooks on the future. We collaborate in studying these crisis-scapes and exploring how they…

docARTES is a doctoral programme for performers and composers. It offers a unique environment for critical reflection on musical practice.

The Secret Life of Art Works. Exploring the Boundaries between Art and Life is the first collection of essays to present case studies from the visual arts, architecture, sculpture and numismatics, and to engage critically with theoretical perspectives from art history, psychology, aesthetics and ant…

The research project of Yannis Patoukas proposes to explore the different intersections between experimental rock music of the 1960s and 1970s and electroacoustic music, with regard to studio practices and production techniques and their creative possibilities.

The basic concern that informs every part of the research is in wonder of what happens when sound happens as an aesthetic force. The emphasis of each query lies on the active occasion, the radical empiricism, the moment of encounter, how the sonic event comes to pass as aesthetic force.

The master's programme in Philosophy of Humanities at Leiden University allows you to specialise in conceptual and methodological issues in the Humanities.

What is the role of memory in contemporary music?

This project, executed by Marieke Hendriksen MA MRes, aims at an analysis of how the early modern anatomical collections of Leiden University were rooted in ideals of perfection in different fields of knowledge and expertise.

LUCIS funded several research programmes to boost interfaculty and interdisciplinary cooperation and to widen the involvement of LUCIS members.

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

The Leiden Lectures in Media | Art | Politics (MAP) is a series of talks organized by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. Speakers from various academic backgrounds and in different stages of their careers reflect on diverging ways in which technological and social changes challenge and transform…

LUCAS hosts a wide variety of research. Here we outline some of the most important research themes.

Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy.

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).

Discover the impact of Instagram on our daily lives in the book On Display. Boy and Uitermark delve into the platform's influence on our social interactions.

Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s entry in Auteur Press’s Devil's Advocate series provides a complete study of the aesthetic appeal of Roger Corman's influential first Poe picture House of Usher.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections between a variety of artistic and cultural expressions and their role in society from 1800 onwards.

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language.

Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering.