In films kunnen de meest wonderlijke acties plaatsvinden. Maar zijn die acties in de 'echte' wereld ook mogelijk? En in hoeverre houden filmmakers ons voor de gek? Tijdens het Leiden International Film Festival komen film en wetenschap samen.

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 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 >

The Master’s in Korean Studies at Leiden University offers a unique opportunity to conduct graduate level research, on various aspects of pre-modern and contemporary Korea, and to spend a full academic year at a university in South Korea.

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.

This edited collection brings together canonical texts on intermedia and expanded cinema in 1960s Japan, most of which translated into English for the first time, in hope to introduce the local critical discourse on this subject to international readership.

Bahar Şimşek defended her thesis on 4 May 2021.

Thomas Mes defended his thesis on 9 January 2018.

On the 28th of September Go Hirasawa successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Could an emergent Cinema of Un-Belonging discover forms of narrative time relevant to the long-term, inter-generational fractures caused by forced traumatic dispersion?

On the 16th of December, Yachan Liang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yachan on this achievement!

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.

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

How do we define the works of a film director whose films cross many established boundaries at once?

Seven prominent North Korean exiles will shed new light on the dictatorial state in a conference hosted by Leiden University on 17 and 18 September. All of the speakers once held high-ranking positions in the regime and now reveal its inner workings.

The greatest threat to the North Korean regime is not the outside world but its own developing private market and the growing frictions at the top. This was the argument put forward by North Korean exile Jang Jin-sung in his lecture in Leiden on 18 September 2014.

This study aims to examine how South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and Japan, two neighboring countries in Northeast Asia, have been responding to and mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

A film and quiz at the Old Observatory, a film whose ending you decide or a political satire in The Hague. These are some of the options at Science & Cinema, the 444 edition, a special programme during LIFF, the Leiden International Film Festival.

North Korean labourers are still being forced to work in the European Union. According to researchers, including Professor of Korean Studies Remco Breuker at Leiden University, Dutch companies are buying ships from a dockyard that uses North Korean workers.

In her dissertation, Xiao Ma takes education as a lens to reveal the dynamic relations of three groups of South Koreans – parents, students, and educational agencies – to nation-states of both the origin and arrival. Her study shows the temporality and ambivalence of population movements between two…

North Korean workers designed and built numerous monuments, museums and other buildings in southern Africa. This is clear from research by history student Tycho van der Hoog for his master's thesis. These monuments can be an important source of income for a country that has become quite isolated on…

A workshop (Cairo, Egypt, 14-15 September 2018) organized by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo with support from “DICIS” / Digital Cinema Studies https://www.digitalcinemastudies.com/

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

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.

In order to be able to handle the pressure of modern life better, Koreans practise GiCheon: intensive exercises for body and spirit. This movement theory is based on the tradition of mountain ascetics, but GiCheon is primarily a modern urban phenomenon. This is the conclusion of PhD candidate Victoria…

How to deal with the Pyongyang regime? Is North Korea irrational? Prof. Remco Breuker proposes a new approach.

On 8 May, the memoirs of Jang Jin-sung are appearing worldwide under the title Dear Leader. Jan Jin-sung was a member of the personal circle of the former North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. Dear Leader provides a radically different perspective on the workings of the regime, as it reveals the moving…

The threats from North Korea have become so serious that the US and South Korea may feel compelled to respond. Remco Breuker, Leiden Professor of Korean Studies, would like to see a European mediator.

North Korean detention camps are no different from Nazi prison camps. But as long as the country remains economically isolated, international criticism will be ineffective, writes North Korea expert Remco Breuker in the opinion section of Dutch newspaper NRC on 21 February. Breuker advocates using the…

What is the role of technology and cyberculture in Korean social structures and in the potential formation of a new collective subjectivity? How do we reorient disoriented souls?

The two-year master's in Korean Studies, a specialization of Leiden University’s master's in Asian Studies, offers a varied selection of subjects and the freedom to choose electives. You can also choose a research subject of your interest for your MA thesis.

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…

Find out how to apply for Korean studies at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.