LUCAS pools expertise in the fields of literary history and theory, book, film and media studies, and art history. Exploring cultural production in Europe, Latin America and Africa, the institute’s research programme focuses on the continuous interconnectedness of the Arts and Society in both the textual culture of literature, learning and public debate and the visual culture of art, architecture, film, photography and the digital media. The institute hosts a variety of academic disciplines, covering the period from classical antiquity to contemporary culture. LUCAS is therefore uniquely placed to study the  broad concept of the Arts, with its rapidly changing ideas and theories of cultural production, as a response to societal challenges. 

LUCAS aims to develop its research programme further in four domains which are of particular interest for the interaction of the Arts and/in Society: (1) religion, (2) science & technology, (3) law & justice and (4) politics. Cultural production and cultural practices shape and are shaped by the debates, ideologies and beliefs in these fields of human agency – no matter what period or art form. New PhD projects in these four domains will further enhance LUCAS’s research in the Arts: 

1. Through the ages texts, images and objects of all kinds have been instruments of religious self-formation, vehicles for confronting, commenting on and confirming theological doctrine or artistic expressions of piety. 
2. Although, after centuries of collaboration, the humanities and the sciences seem to have gone their separate ways as academic disciplines, art interacts continuously with new technologies and fields of learning in social and cultural practices. 
3. Literature and law, both being language based, are mutually inspiring and also mutually critical sister disciplines with regard to issues of justice. Fundamental concepts, such as personhood, are shared by the domains of law and literature. Literature and art, in general, have been – and still are – keen to dwell within and beyond the limits of the law. 
4. For this domain politics should be understood in a broad sense: as the collective process of practices, choices and acts that determine the realisation of one world or another. Possible focus areas for research could be strategies of power, institutions, aesthetics, etc. 

• art history
• film studies
• literary studies
• media studies

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