About us
ARTES research engages with political, intellectual and institutional cultures in their national as well as transnational dimensions, and with questions of cultural, linguistic and religious identities and their representations in music, the visual and performing arts, and literature. As an interdisciplinary and transnational Research School, ARTES aims to go beyond traditional ‘area’ and ‘regional’ studies approaches, focusing also on the re-making and relations between world and regional orders, borders, and identities, historically and in today’s world. ARTES research approaches space on various levels, cutting across the world regions that make up our expertise: translocal, transnational and transregional, as well as non-territorial geographies. Next to spatial approaches, our research is grouped in five main transversal theme clusters: belonging and identity, social justice and contestation, power and governance, sustainability and disruption, digital networks, communications, and technologies.
Europe and Europeanness
A significant part of our research concerns Europe. ARTES goes beyond the remit of most EU-studies programs in bringing together both political/institutional as well as cultural and historical approaches. It extends its understanding of Europe and Europeanness to include the multiple ways in which Europe has been, and continues to be, present beyond the traditionally conceived borders of Europe. ARTES research queries both formal plans for European unity, and the ways in which Europeanness has been and is made in practice, in the multiple and diverse lived identities of those who feel themselves to be ‘European’. An important focus in ARTES is to ‘deprovincialize’ Europe: to understand how Europe has tried and tries to (re)make the world in its image, but also how its various worldly encounters have indelibly shaped Europe-making and Europeans – from formal and long-standing colonial and post-colonial encounters, to myriad networks of material and intellectual exchange.
World Regions
A strong focus of our research is, accordingly, Europe’s historical and contemporary relations with the rest of the world, both with its immediate neighbors but also with other regions and powers. ARTES brings together research groups focused on the politics, culture and identities of the Mediterranean and Middle East, the societal developments of Latin America (in the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation, or CEDLA), as well as those focused on the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus and Central and East Asia. Moreover, the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (ACMES) is associated with ARTES.
Humanities and Social Sciences
Our unique strength comes from combining both humanities-based and social scientific approaches, including cultural history, comparative literature, political, legal and institutional studies, geography, area studies, anthropology and religious studies. Such a wide-ranging set of approaches allows us to engage, at once, current political and geopolitical preoccupations but also wider cultural and political questions.
Desk
- Coordinator: Paul Koopman
- Director: Guido Snel
Office: Binnengasthuisstraat 9, 1012 ZA Amsterdam, room 203 | Postal address: Postbus 1605, 1000 BP Amsterdam
Please contact us at: artes-fgw@uva.nl
Advisory board
The ARTES Advisory Board consists of six senior academics from different disciplines within ARTES and two PhD researchers. The Board assists the director in assessment procedures and offers advice about the approval of research groups and the selection of research areas. The Advisory Board members are: