In this lecture professor Harding considered the implications of Asia's 21st-century rise for its legal systems and our approaches to studying them in the new situation we confront in the early 21st century.

The Asian Library holds the largest collection on Indonesia worldwide, and some of the foremost collections on South and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea.

The Master’s in Asian Studies at Leiden University is your opportunity to earn a specialised qualification from one of the leading centres for Asian studies in Europe.

Designed for high-achieving students, Leiden University’s research MA Asian Studies offers access to unique resources and expertise. Asian Studies at Leiden University has a reputation for excellence that is unmatched in Europe. You can choose subjects from a curriculum that spans the entire Asian region,…

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.

Are you thinking about studying Asian Studies (Research MA)? Learn more and watch the programme presentation.

The MA South Asian Studies at Leiden University is designed for students with an interest in studying South Asia from a range of perspectives including its history, literature, art, media, culture, religions, philosophy and philology.

The research profile ‘Asian Modernities and Traditions’ (AMT) aims to raise the strength and visibility of research, teaching and dissemination on Asian studies at Leiden University. AMT focuses on those areas where there are clear strengths or exciting new developments ahead, bundled into five them…

The master’s in East Asian Studies, a specialisation within the master's of Asian Studies, combines an exceptional range of courses with advanced language training and outstanding resources and expertise.

South and Southeast Asia, a region that includes India, Indonesia, and seventeen other countries, is one of the world’s most dynamic and diverse areas. Are you interested in speaking one of the region's major languages and understanding its history, culture, and current affairs? Then this is the bachelor's…

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

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 MA Southeast Asian Studies at Leiden University explores Southeast Asia in-depth and from the perspective of its history, literature, media, culture, religions, philosophy or philology.

Are you thinking about studying 1-year Asian Studies programme? Learn more and watch this short programme presentation!

What was the relationship between women and modern media in different parts of Asia in the 20th century? Under what historical and social conditions did women achieve prominence in popular music in Asia?

This Conference volume unites a wide range of scholars working in the fields of history, archaeology, religion, art, and philology in an effort to explore new perspec-tives and methods in the study of primary sources from premodern South and Southeast Asia.

IIAS promotes critical, humanistic, and collaborative work on, with, in, and beyond Asia.

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.

Study information, Online Experience

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project.

Why is there no Northeast Asian security architecture? Assessing the strategic impediments to a stable East Asia. In this article, published in 'The Pacific Review', the authors Wang (Peking University) en Stevens (Leiden University) discuss the reasons why.

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

Announcement of the publication of Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2017).

What can we learn from the diverse institutional logics of smart government in East Asia to inform cross-institutional AI governance?

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo

On Friday 16 May Juul Eijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

The new blog Afro-Asian Visions showcases new and ongoing research on Afro-Asian interactions through networks of artists, intellectuals, technical experts, and activists. It is designed as an online magazine.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

An exhibition at Oude UB takes visitors to the historical Silk Road. Old maps, clothes and jewellery reflect the rich heritage of the cities of Central Asia and their inhabitants.

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

This book explores the Indian tradition of liberalism through a critical intellectual biography of Valangaiman Sankaranarayana Srinivasa Sastri (1869–1946).

Leiden University Centre for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) is housed in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University.

In the book 'Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of Modern South Asian Studies, uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world. She was interviewed about the book in the New Books in South East Asian…

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions research area will be presented on 9 September, in the form a conference. The keynote speaker is Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of the Asia Research Institute of the Singapore National University. The title of his address is Sustainability and…

The researchers in the World Archaeology department of the Faculty of Archaeology concentrate on a range of different periods and regions: from humanity’s origins to the Middle Ages and the modern age, and from Asia to South America.

The department of World Archaeology combines research and education about regions all over the world, from Human Origins to the Middle Ages, and from Europe, to Asia, Africa and the America’s. That broad range in time and space makes the department a dynamic pluriform community with many different approaches,…

On Wednesday 5 February 2025 Milan Ismangil successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Leiden University Centre for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) is a centre housed in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University.

Organisations such as the EU are of enormous benefit to the member states, but the inhabitants of the member states are often unaware of this. Leiden researchers investigate whether international organisations such as the EU or ASEAN are able to influence global politics.

Racism and discrimination come in many different shapes and forms – in the Netherlands too. Verbal attacks, stereotypes and violence: some people are confronted with these on a daily basis. A group that is often not included in research and the debate on racism is people of Asian descent. The Diversity…

During this course, specialists from Leiden University and beyond will provide instruction on issues of editing, paleography and conservation of oriental manuscripts. They will also speak about philology, literacy and orality and the transmission of knowledge in the Islamic manuscript culture, presenting…

AI has huge societal and economic potential and is widely used. But it also brings challenges: how do we combine human values with AI, how do we make AI more transparent and understandable, and what can AI and human cognition learn from each other, for example about language learning?