Category:School of Oriental and African Studies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The School of Oriental and African Studies (often abbreviated to SOAS) was founded in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies at 2, Finsbury Circus, the then premises of the London Institution. Africa was added to the school's name and remit in 1938 and the school shifted to Malet Street , Russell Square in 1941. The institution's founding mission was primarily to train British administrators for overseas postings across the empire. Since then the school has grown into the world's foremost centre for the exclusive study of Asia and Africa. A college of the University of London, SOAS fields include Law, Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages with special reference to Asia and Africa. SOAS today is a source of some of the most influential and innovative thinking in many fields of the social sciences and humanities, principally, but not exclusively in relation to Asia and Africa. The SOAS Library, housed in a building designed at the beginning of the 1970s by Sir Denys Lasdun, is the UK's national resource for materials relating to Asia and Africa and is the largest of its kind in Europe.