Extra opportunities

For students looking for an extra challenge in addition to their Master's, there are several options. 

Thesis awards

Students who pursue a degree in Religious Studies are intrinsically motivated and this shows in their study results. Our graduates are regularly awarded prizes for writing excellent theses.

  • Veerle Dijkstra won the 2022 Thesis Award of the Faculty of Humanities. The title of her thesis is “Going Digital: Corona as a Lens onto the Dynamics of Religious Mediation in Four Christian Church Communities in The Netherlands.”
  • Wouter Kock was awarded the 2022 Jan Brouwer Thesis Award of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. The title of his thesis is “Loss in Translation: The Heritagization of Catholic Monasteries.” 
  • Rashmi Shetty won the 2021 Thesis Award of the Faculty of Humanities. The title of her thesis is “Digitally Mediated Neo-Hindutva Affective Economies and Publics.”
  • Chunrong Zhao won the 2020 Cornelis Tiele MA Thesis Award of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion. The title of his thesis is “Overcoming Essentialism: A Transcultural Approach to Gandhāran Buddhist Material Culture.”

Expand your network and professional skills

  • You are invited to attend and present at international conferences and workshops. Members of the staff will support you in preparing proposals for presentations.
  • You will participate in various activities of research schools in the Netherlands in which various universities collaborate. For students of this programme, the research schools NOSTER and NISIS are especially interesting.
  • There may be opportunities to work as a teaching assistant for one of the Bachelor courses. This will give you the chance to gain some teaching experience at a university.

Interdisciplinary honours programmes

You can choose from three of the university wide honours programmes below. In these interdisciplinary programmes you will work on varying social and academic issues together with students from other disciplines. By analysing issues from different angles you learn how you can navigate in current complex societies at a broad and connecting level. After completing these honours programmes you will receive an honours certificate during a festive ceremony.

For more information on honours programmes at the UU, go to the Honours College website or Instagram.