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

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

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.

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 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…

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…

Are you thinking about studying European Politics and Society? Learn more and watch the programme presentation.

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

The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto

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 the unique two-year international joint Master’s programme in European Politics and Society (EPS) you will be able to study at four major European research universities in the cities of Prague, Leiden, Krakow and Barcelona.

Are you thinking about studying Philosophical Perspectives on Politics and the Economy? Learn more and watch the introduction and the programme presentation.

Porosity between Politics and the Economy addresses the relationships between politics and the economy in deeply original ways. It is a book motivated by a sense of urgency aroused by both the failure of modern capitalism and the environmental crisis.

Proceedings of the Vth International Conference of Isis Studies, Boulogne-sur-Mer, October 13-15, 2011

This book explores the spiritual potential of faith, mysticism and transcendence in answer to the dangers of a mythologised state and the sacro-sanctification of (liberal) democracy and its rule of law.

This PhD project analyses the politics and aesthetics of depictions of torture in American and European ‘war on terror’ films.

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

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 master's programme in Philosophical Perspectives on Politics and the Economy at Leiden University continues the programme formerly known as Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

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 Modern and Contemporary Cluster is the largest within LUCAS and home to more than 100 staff members and PhD candidates. Hosting a diverse group of young and advanced scholars, it offers an especially fruitful and dynamic environment for interdisciplinary collaboration.

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).

This project will clarify how these concepts operated in theoretical writings on performance ,this broadened conceptual framework will not only give us a clear view on how sublime effects in performance were theorized, it will also provide us a concrete apparatus to understand the cultural and political…

In this paper, the authors study how individual and country-level variables interact in affecting political gender attitudes in Europe.

The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is devoted to the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present time in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

The Lucia de Berk case or the suicide of Slobodan Praljak at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: certain trials keep popping up in media. In her dissertation, Tessa de Zeeuw examines the cultural appeal of such cases and analyses artistic responses. ‘Artworks sometimes have…

Political scientist Luzia Helfer (Leiden University) empirically tested claims about media-politics relatiopns using unique data from experimental studies with elected politicians and political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

Muhammad Adlin Sila examines the range of ways Bima Muslims constitute their Islamic identities and agencies through rituals and festivals. In response to their surroundings, what it means to be a Muslim is constantly being negotiated.

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

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.

The complexities of modernization in Brazil and Graciliano Ramos significance for our understanding of Brazil today.

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.

The eleven innovative essays in this volume explore the notion that all forms of modern mass politics, including liberal democracies, need such a form of sacralization of politics to function.

Many of the big challenges of the 21st century (climate change, international migration, financial instability, socio-economic inequality) find their origins in the organisation of the global economy. Any solution to the world’s big challenges therefore requires forceful policy interventions at the…

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

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 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…

Chaider Bamualim defended his thesis on 9 September 2015