The master’s programme in German Literature and Culture at Leiden University offers the largest number of German-language master’s courses in the Netherlands and covers the fields of literary and cultural studies from the Middle Ages to the present.

This MA programme offers an excellent qualification in Italian literature and culture on an advanced level through lectures and seminars led by specialists in the field.

Are you thinking about studying Arts, Literature and Media? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

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…

The one-year, English-taught master's programme in English Literature and Culture focuses on the interaction between literature and key political and social issues such as identity, migration, memory and the metropolis, but also between literature and the literary tradition, and literature and film.

Develop your knowledge of French and Francophone literary works and genres with the Master’s programme in French Literature and Culture at Leiden University.

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

The master in Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory at Leiden University studies contemporary literature and culture (art, cinema, pop music) from a theoretical, critical perspective, with special emphases on approaches developed in cultural and literary studies, feminist theory, phenomenology and…

Are you thinking about studying English Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying French Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying Italian Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying German Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

This interdisciplinary research master offers the best of three worlds (arts, literature and media) through a program of well-designed courses, with ample space for specialization. It combines theoretically grounded methods and approaches with period-specific training that focuses either on the medieval…

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

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.

Are you thinking about studying Literature and Society. Europe and Beyond? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

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…

On 18 May 2022 Lan-Yi Yang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The project focuses on an intriguing aspect of André Chénier’s poetry, which has not received much attention in scholarship: Chénier’s indebtedness – in the form of translation, adaptation, borrowing, reference – to Hellenistic poetry; it interprets the role of this indebtedness in his poetical and…

This dissertation focuses on irregular patterns in Vedic Grammar and Poetry.

The skin has recently gained attention within body studies for its many specific cultural and social associations, in addition to its biology. This project aims to examine the different layers of meaning and the functions invested in the skin in ancient Greece: how did ancient Greek literary and medical…

On the 12th of December, Alice Ross T. Morta successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Alice on this achievement!

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.

The month of May saw LUGO host its Spring Event, which consisted of a poetry reading and clotheswap! The event took place on May 10th at Rapenburg 100, in Leiden, from 17.30 to 20.30, and included free vegan snacks provided for by the Green Kitchen.

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

The Summer School in Languages and Linguistics has been a regular event on the Leiden Centre for Linguistics calendar for over 14 years.

This study examines the system and poetics of literary patronage in the Renaissance by presenting a comprehensive analysis of the poetry of Giannantonio Campano. In this way, it addresses two themes largely overlooked by modern scholarship.

In this publication, May Tamimova and Tahir Abbas researched the existing literature about violence and hatred against places of worship.

In Leiden University’s master’s programme Literature in Society. Europe and Beyond you will develop your knowledge of the interactive relationship between literature and society, focusing on key political and social issues from a transnational perspective.

The programme focuses on the medieval dynamics of intellectual life in the Rhineland and the Low countries, nowadays divided over five countries (Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands) but one cultural region in the later Middle Ages.

The Layered Heart : Essays on Persian Poetry is published in celebration of the poet and scholar Dick Davis, dubbed “our pre-eminent translator from Persian” by The Washington Post.

My research examines children’s responses to humor in children’s poems translated from English into Filipino.

This project proposes to connect two discourses highly present in contemporary literary criticism in China, as well as on the world literary scene and academic circles: the discussion on emigration literature and the concept of ‘essayness’ derived mainly from (post)modern Western theories of the ess…

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

One of the most intriguing papyri discovered and published in recent years is the so called

This book contains the first three Leiden-Aramco Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture delivered by Petra Sijpesteijn, James E. Montgomery and Geert Jan van Gelder.

Barbarism: from the 18th century to the present.

This 25th volume in the series 'Islam in Africa', edited by Annachiara Raia, is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state.

The aim of the Indonesian-Dutch Literature Collective (which is allied to the Society of Dutch Literature (MNL)) is to support research into the literature of and about the Dutch Indies, from the era of the Dutch East India Company to the present. Starting in 1986, the collective has published its own…

In the Special Issue of Matatu: “Power to the People?” Patronage, Intervention and Transformation in African Performative Artspaper, Annachiara Raia seeks to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry, in the utendi and mashairi forms…

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

This research project analyses the use of different, often competing, stereotypical images of Rome in Humanist Latin Poetry, by considering it as strategic appropriation of the classical heritage.

This research aims to address the connection between Sufism and modern Arabic Literature (specifically, Palestinian literature).

Counter-Discourse in Zimbabwean Literature is a study of specific aspects of counter-discursive Zimbabwean narratives in English. In discussing the selected texts, my thesis is based on Terdiman’s (1989) the postcolonial concept of counter-discourse.

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature.

The Survey of Literature is published twice a year (February and August).

In the master’s programme in Older Dutch literature at Leiden University you will study Dutch literature from the Middle Ages (1100-1550) until the Golden Age and Enlightenment (1550-1800). During the programme you will develop a vision on the value of the Dutch literary heritage.