Religious Studies

The Religious Studiescourse at Utrecht Universityis a challenging, research-oriented program that prepares you for participation in international research and for a career in domains where religious diversity and difference are significant factors - in culture, art, and politics.

The Religious Studies course at Utrecht University engages with the central themes and theories of religious studies, offering opportunities for focused research in the following areas:

• Material and Embodied Religion: This area examines the role of the human body and material objects in religious practices. Topics include embodied actions such as praying, fasting, and dancing, as well as the function of objects like buildings, food, clothing, weapons, and digital media in religious contexts.

• Ethics and Politics in Plural Societies: Research in this area considers the role of religion in societal debates and political developments, with attention to issues such as religious diversity, gender equality, and conflict.

• Religion and Heritage: This area explores how heritage as a political category shapes the recognition and valuation of religious expressions—both tangible and intangible—within secular frameworks of culture and art.

• Religious Texts and Practices: Building on the foundational focus on religious texts, this area reconceptualizes textual engagement as an embodied and mediated practice. It examines the interrelations between texts, their users, material forms, and oral or scriptural traditions.

Career prospects

The research Master’s program in Religious Studies is designed for students with the ability and ambition to pursue an academic career, but graduates of Religious Studies also come to work in other professions as editors, museum professionals, researchers, journalists, and policy advisors.

Accredited by the NVAO - Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders.

Courses include:

• Politics, Democracy, and Religion

• Doing Research in Religious Studies

• Religious Texts and Interpretive Practices

• Materiality and Corporeality of Lived Religion

• Religion, Gender and Sexuality