Master of Arts in Religious Studies
Utrecht, Netherlands
MA
DURATION
2 years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2026
TUITION FEES
EUR 20,605 / per year *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* for Non-EU/EEA students (institutional fee) | Dutch and other EU/EEA students (statutory fee, full-time) 2025-2026: € 2.601
Key Summary
Key research areas
The program 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 programme 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. Below are examples of recent alumni still in an early phase of their career.
Academic Careers
During the programme you will learn from internationally leading scholars, including laureates of prestigious awards and research grants. You will actively participate in their research projects and their international networks. This significantly enhances your prospects of being offered a funded PhD position.
Professional careers
A research Master provides its students with more analytical skills and advanced multidisciplinary research competencies, as well as insights in historical and transnational developments that shape the impact of religion on societies, groups and individuals worldwide. Such qualifications are valuable for a variety of positions in administration, consultancy, education, media, and cultural institutions.
Compulsory Courses
- Politics, Democracy, and Religion
- Doing Research in Religious Studies
- Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion
- Religious Texts and Interpretive Practices
- Materiality and Corporeality of Lived Religion
- RST-Research School 1
- RST-Research School 2
- Thesis Religious Studies
Compulsory Choice
- Religion, Gender and Sexuality (academic year 2025-2026)
- Genealogies of Religious (In)Tolerance (academic year 2025-2026)
- Religion and Popular Culture (academic year 2026-2027)
- Image Wars: Religion and Symbolic Destruction (academic year 2026-2027)
Recommended Electives
- RST-Internship Religious Studies
- Fieldwork
- RST-Study Abroad/Fieldwork in Religious Studies
Other Electives
- Contemporary Cultural Theory
- Thinking Literature: Creative Forms of Knowledge
- Tutorial Religious Studies I
- Tutorial Religious Studies II
- Cultural Memory and Citizenship
- Issues in Postcoloniality
- Media Materialities
- Religion and Secularism: Postsecular Perspectives
- Aesthetics of the Posthuman
- Corporeal Literacy
- The Body in Feminist Theory and Practice
- Topics in the Philosophy of Human Rights
- Topics in Moral Psychology external link
- Feminist and Queer Studies: Special Topics external link
- Urban Interfaces