This book project explores the changing dynamics of marriage and family life in postwar Japan based on an examination of the life histories of single mothers.

This study focuses on increasing our understanding of the different pathways converts take during conversion to Islam.

Mei-Wen Chen defended her thesis on 29 June 2016

This book presents the results of a research about the Islamic courts of Cianjur in West Java, and Bulukumba in South Sulawesi and the role they play in local divorce practices.

Political Islam is not new to the Middle East, but the appearance of ISIS has stretched the phenomenon to the extreme.

In this paper, the authors study how individual and country-level variables interact in affecting political gender attitudes in Europe.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: T.R. van Andel

In the early modern period women played a prominent role in crime. At times they even made up half of all defendants. Female criminality was a typically urban phenomenon. Why do we find so many women before the Dutch criminal courts?

Rebecca Tompkins defended her thesis on 21 March 2019

On Wednesday 14 February 2024 Yorum Beekman successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book connects labour history, global history and the institutional or political history of international organisations.

How do women and men living in logging concessions in Solomon Islands experience the impacts of logging during and after logging operations? This project assesses how and why industrial logging affects men and women differently. Using insights from an ethnographic case-study of the logging industry…

How can we explain that Caribbean small states have the most stable two-party systems in the world, while Pacific small states have either very weak parties or no parties at all? Matthew Louis Bishop (University of Sheffield, UK), Jack Corbett (University of Southampton, UK) and Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden…

The shift from response to recovery is now noticeable as the world moves past the paralyzing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book explores responses to the pandemic by international, regional, and local institutions, multilateral action, and crisis prevention efforts at different levels of governance,…

Social and Behavioural Sciences, Centre for Science and Technology Studies

What is the population size and social structure in time and space? What is the lion diet and food preference in time and space? What is the home range (MCP and Kernel) and movement in time and space? What are human – lion conflict and responses of lions to traditional herding in time and space? What…

Analysing the ways in which immigration structurally challenges and changes the organization and conceptual boundaries of national welfare states.

A new volume, co-edited by Nadine Akkerman of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, shows how ladies-in-waiting, by 'creatively manipulating their gender', often played a major role in shaping the political climate of Europe in the early modern period.

Fourteen women professors are to be given a place in the classic portrait gallery in Leiden University’s Senate Chamber. The portraits will be unveiled on 8 March – International Women’s Day – by former Minister of Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker and Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker.

On 8 March, International Women’s Day, equal opportunities for women worldwide, empowerment, and gender equality take centre stage. For years, the role of women in the past has been nearly invisible. Four archaeologists reflect on this inequality of focus, from hunter-gatherers in the palaeolithic to…

Women In International Security (WIIS) is a global organisation dedicated to advancing the leadership and professional development of women in the field of international peace and security. As part of her research on women, peace and security, Dr. Vanessa Newby at the Institute for Security and Global…

On 3 September 2019, Ilektra Antonaki defended her thesis 'Privatisations and golden shares: Bridging the gap between the State and the market in the area of free movement of capital in the EU'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. S.C.G. Van den Bogaert.

Leiden University has a new network for female academics: Sophia. Sophia strives for equal opportunities and a better working environment for female academic staff.

Women behind the front play an important role in a large proportion of Iranian novels, written on the Iran and Iraq-war (1980-1988). But their martyrdom is an uncommon theme. Saeedeh Shahnahpur will give a lecture on this subject on 16 February.

An international team with researchers from Leiden revealed how a bacterium repurposed an internal system to control its movements. Movement control is very important in host invasion, which can lead to disease. Publication on 27 April in Nature Communications.

Today, 8 March, marks International Women's Day. Leiden University fosters her female, talented staff members, and continues to strive towards more women on leading scientific positions.

On 8 March, International Women’s Day, equal opportunities for women worldwide, empowerment, and gender equality take centre stage. This day has been celebrated in the Netherlands since 1912, usually centring around a specific theme. This year’s theme: solidarity, the power for change.

Women are are on the agenda again at Leiden University. That was clear on 8 March in the Academy Building. First there was an informal get-together with women professors and talented researchers, followed by the 27th Annie Romein-Verschoor lecture, on happy and angry women.

Dr Nadine Akkerman, lecturer in Early Modern Literature and postdoctoral researcher in Leiden, has written a new book to accompany the exhibition on Elizabeth Stuart and Amalia von Solms at the Historical Museum of The Hague. ‘They were like goddesses, constantly trying to upstage one another,’ says…

Subproject of

Women confined to the kitchen? Not in Scheveningen around 1900. There, some women ran entire shipping companies. This is according to new research by history student Sjors Stuurman. He compiled the results in a book he wrote for Muzee Scheveningen.

Organizations often announce their protest activities prior to their implementation to mobilize awareness, recruit supporters, and receive media attention. We are interested in the effectiveness of protest announcements—that is, under what conditions governments make concessions to avoid having an announced…

For the first time ever, more women than men have been awarded PhDs at Leiden University. In 2019, 226 women defended their dissertations as opposed to 207 men. More women were also awarded a distinction: seven of the thirteen ‘cum laude’ distinctions were awarded to women.

Rietje Knaap’s (83) PhD was a real feat of endurance, but she persisted. ‘You’re married so you don’t need a pension, do you?’ What are the experiences of Knaap and women who followed in her footsteps? In the run-up to International Women’s Day on 8 March, three generations of female doctors look back…

On 7 February 2021, Christa Tobler appeared on the BBC Wales radio programme 'Sunday Supplement' (a political and current affairs programme), entitled 'Covid, homelessness and votes for women'. The 50th anniversary of Swiss women's suffrage at the federal level, is commemorated on 7 February 2021.

This monograph, written by dr. Dennie Oude Nijhuis and published by Cambridge University Press, discusses the postwar development of the welfare state.

Four students founded the Leiden Student Working Group on Homosexuality on the day of the Dies Natalis in 1968. This was to be the start of the LBGT+ movement in Leiden, which celebrated its 50-year anniversary this year. What has been achieved and what is the status of emancipation today?

Christa Tobler writes an extensive article on voting rights for different groups for the annual congress of the

Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present.

Leiden University is in third place in the Netherlands for the percentage of women professors, behind the Open University and Radboud University in Nijmegen. This is reported in the Review of Women Professors 2018.

The Arab women are coming! That was Kim Ghattas’s message on 6 March in the 25th Annie Romein-Verschoor Lecture. It won’t be easy and it could take a long time, but they can do it. The Arab Springs have inspired them, and they’re not letting go of that.

They existed and were important, but for too long they have remained invisible in historiography: women. Ariadne Schmidt, the Magdalena Moons endowed professor, researches the history of urban culture in Leiden. Women take pride of place in her research. Inaugural lecture on 28 February.

It often takes longer for women with heart problems to get the right diagnosis. In her Annie Romein-Verschoor Lecture, Professor Hester den Ruijter will talk about how hormones influence the heart and the importance of medical research that focuses specifically on women.

For a month long, the Senate Chamber of Leiden University was reserved for portraits of women. The work of art showing a hundred unique portraits of female professors has now been put into storage, but the board of the University is taking measures to promote the image of women in science.

International Women's Day (8 March) saw the announcement of the first Leiden Top 50: fifty Leiden women who have made a difference over the past year through their activities. Many of the women in the list are affiliated with our University.

Spying in the seventeenth century was a man’s job. That had been the prevailing impression, until the Veni research by Nadine Akkerman from Leiden University...

Since 2015 the United Nations have declared 11 February the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Leiden University organized a public event for over a hundred visitors. In between a lecture on the building blocks of life and a talkshow on the impact of science on society, high school students…