Leiden University Institute for Area Studies

Aim
LIAS has as its aim the advancement of this inclusive, globally conscious vision of area studies at Leiden University and in the wider academic community, focusing on Asia and the Middle East, and with emphatic attention to the relevance of education and research for society at large. To this end, it wants to be a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas, with the latter defined along geographical and/or cultural and/or linguistic and/or political lines. Area studies as an approach to knowledge that starts from the study of places in the human world is undergirded by deep linguistic and cultural knowledge, critical reflection on the notion of translation, engagement with the areas, effective multi- and interdisciplinarity, and engagement with the disciplines.

Areas and disciplines
As argued in Where Is Here?, areas and disciplines are by no means self-evident. Accordingly, there are various possible ways to group the scholars working in LIAS along more or less culturally / linguistically / geographically defined lines, surveyed here: Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, South Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies (Asia); Arabic Studies, Persian and Iranian Studies, Turkish Studies, Assyriology, Egyptology, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Papyrology (Middle East).

LIAS staff have disciplinary expertise in anthropology, archeology, art history, development studies, economics, film studies, history, international relations, language pedagogy, law, linguistics, literary studies, material culture studies, media studies, performing arts studies, philology, philosophy, political economy, political science, the study of religion, and sociology.