School of Oriental and African Studies
The
School of Oriental and African Studies (commonly abbreviated to
SOAS) or, less usually, the
London School of Oriental and African Studies (
LSOAS) is a Recognised Body within the federal
University of London.
SOAS was founded in
1916 as the School of Oriental Studies at 2, Finsbury Circus,
London,
England, the then premises of the
London Institution. Africa was added to the school's name and remit in 1938 and the school shifted to
Thornhaugh Street, which runs between
Malet Street and
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.
The school has grown considerably over the past thirty years, from under 1,000 students in the 1970s to nearly 4,000 students today, approximately half of them postgraduates.
The school also houses two galleries: the
Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, one of the foremost collections of Chinese ceramics in Europe, and the Brunei Gallery, completed in
1995, which stages temporary exhibitions of both historical and contemporary materials which reflect subjects and regions studied at SOAS.
The main campus was moved to a new, purpose-built home, just off
Russell Square in
Bloomsbury in
1938, and has much expanded since then. The present library building was added in
1973, the Brunei Gallery in
1995, and an extension to the library building opened in
2004 (the second phase of this expansion is due to be completed in
2006).
A new campus at Vernon Square in Islington was opened in
2001.
In 2004 and 2005, SOAS was rated fourth in the United Kingdom in the
Guardian universities league table.
