Leiden University’s Department of Turkish Languages and Cultures
Turkish Studies
The Turkish Studies Department of Leiden University is one of the largest research and teaching departments in its field in Europe. It has a permanent staff of six, one of whom is permanently stationed in Istanbul and eight additional staff members with non-tenured positions. It offers BA,MA, M.Phil and PhD degrees.The department maintains links with the Turkish academic and intellectual world, resulting in a constant inflow of Turkish MA and PhD students. The Department offers a MA programme in European Studies jointly with Istanbul Bilgi University, and a MA programme in Turkish Studies with Sabancı University in Istanbul. These programmes are taught partly in Istanbul and partly in Leiden. The teaching is enhanced with regular guest lectures by professors from other universities from the Netherlands and abroad. The department of Turkish Studies combines expertise in the languages of the region with historically oriented research programmes. The department has strong national and international links, in particular with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London), the EHESS (Paris), the International Institute of Social History, (IISH, Amsterdam), and Bilgi and Sabancı Universities (Istanbul).
The Turkology Update Leiden Project (TULP) is a unique initiative of Leiden University’s Department of Turkish Languages and Cultures (until recently part of the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Islamic Middle East) and Projectgroup Computer Supported Education (COO). It started December 1997 and its first results were published on the World Wide Web by April 1998. The TULP-pages are continually updated and expanded; so watch out for News. TULP will provide a specifically Turkological introduction to the Web for Leiden University’s students of Turkology as well as for the general public interested in aspects of Turkey and Central Asia. Our database of relevant sites will be continually updated and new sites added to our pages.
TULP’s main pages feature A Curricular WebGuide for Turkology, A Topical WebGuide for Turkology and Interactive Turkish Texts (in Dutch).
The curricular guide lists all of the department’s courses, with a selection of sites for each of them. This selection was designed for our students and is incorporated in our courses as a study assignment. This section forms the core of TULP.
Whereas the curricular guide lists only a selection of our database of sites, the topical guide includes every site found and approved for selection. Note that this does in no way mean that it includes all WWW-sites on Turkey or Central Asia, or even all good sites on a specific topic. The database was in fact created for the curricular guide and the topical guide may thus exclude important or even key-sites. Moreover, the character of the Web is such that some types of information can be found in abundance (news, statistical information, etc.) and some are extremely rare (grammar, manuscripts, etc.). We will try to fill these gaps as soon as possible. Suggestions are most welcome and can be sent to M.E. Yıldırım
The Turkology Update Leiden Project(TULP)
TULP’s Database of Interactive Turkish Texts was developed as a tool for our students, combining easily accessible vocabulary and idiom lists with the department’s grammar specialist D. Koopman’s grammatical and syntactical comments and references to his and Dr. Geoffrey Lewis’ Turkish grammar. In April 1998 -when TULP first went online- it consisted of three texts, but new ones will continually be added. It will be used in six of the department’s courses (Modern Turkish Grammar, Grammatical Text Analysis, Sentence Structure 1, Sentence Structure 2, Conversation A and Conversation B). The database is only of use to speakers of Dutch and requires a Java-capable browser.
Source: TULP
