For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

Are you thinking about studying Russian and Eurasian Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

The one-year MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University is a unique programme that stands out for its interdisciplinary approach and relevance to current global affairs.

How did our academic community position itself in relation to a system that deprived people of their freedom? What role did the university, as an educational institution, play with regard to colonialism and the system of slavery? How can we best engage with and manage our special collections?

How was the racial landscape of citizenship and democracy in antebellum America characterized, and how did free Black populations in various states navigate such landscapes?

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This series provides a venue for scholarly work—research monographs and edited volumes—that advances our understanding of the history of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. It fills an important gap in academic publishing and builds upon two relatively recent developments…

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association cooperates with the following partners:

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

These courses address all language skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

Discover history and present. With it's eventful history and politics, Russia is a country with a large influence on Europe and the world. In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme Russian Studies you will learn everything about the culture, language and politics of the largest country in the world and…

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

How does Russia use propaganda and what characterises Russian propaganda in terms of language and argumentation?

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

The Academic Language Centre Leiden offers Russian language courses at various levels and tailor-made Russian language courses. The courses are practical in nature: focusing on the use of the language. More information can be found here >

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

This PhD project investigates specific types of allusions used by Russian native speakers, namely references to classical Russian literature. The research includes the analysis of 1) how native speakers use allusions, 2) what type of discourse allusions are frequently used, and 3) how we can implement…

This book offers a historical and historiographical analysis of the Spanish asiento de negros, a contract between the Spanish Monarchy and private parties to introduce specific number of enslaved Africans to Spanish America.

These four volumes offer students and researchers a rich collection of published works on the history of slavery works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field.

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

Applying linguistics research to solve practical language-related problems in society.

This PhD project investigates the argumentative-rhetorical strategies by which the Russian state attempts to substantiate the legitimacy of its war against Ukraine.

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

The impact of war extends beyond destroyed buildings and torn families. In bilingual Ukraine, the ongoing war with Russia is a major driver for increasingly discarding the Russian language. What does this mean for the position of Russian in Ukraine?

On 18 December 2019, Mikhail Antonov defended his thesis 'Formalism, Realism and Conservatism in Russian Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. W.B. Simons.

Using enslaved people as servants, becoming an administrator in the Dutch West India Company or making uniforms for the colonial army. Many people from Leiden played a role in colonialism and slavery. Historians are conducting preliminary research and finding striking examples.

The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

The University of Bonn, Germany, is happy to announce the opening of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS).

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

Due to the almost complete disappearance of the archive of the Old Dutch West India Company (WIC, 1621-1674) not much is known about the ships and crews of this company. In this project we start the reconstruction of this basic information making use of new digital humanities techniques to extract this…

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

The Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2026 offers a varied program of introductory as well as more advanced courses in Anatolian, Classics, Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Eastern Christianity, Germanic, General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Indo-European, Indology,…

When discussing enslavement, attention often focuses on Africans forcibly shipped to South America. Researcher Timo McGregor's new Veni research sheds light on a lesser-known method, whereby indigenous populations were enslaved through the households of colonisers.