For the annual Week of Classics, Dr Marike van Aerde and her team made a documentary about their research project Routes of Exchange, Roots of Connectivity. In the film the team touches upon the interactions of Greeks and Romans with the wider ancient world, ranging from the African kingdom of Aksum…

What moral concerns do people have when they encounter the financial sector in their everyday life? Erik Bähre's ERC consolidator project 'Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’ aims to find out. In collaboration with Brechtje Boeke, five short documentaries from…

This chapter introduces interactive documentaries (also known as i-docs) in digital and audiovisual anthropology. Interactive documentaries allow an audience to actively engage with an interface in order to experience the content. For example, opening Miranda Dahlin’s Exiliados: Mexican Asylum in El…

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

Biologist, artist, activist and Leiden alumnus Merijn Tinga supped the river Rijn in 28 days, to gain attention for plastic waste. His journey of more than 1000 kilometers has been captured in the documentary ‘From Source to Sea’, that can be seen on 4 June at 20:50 on National Geographic Channel.

PhD candidate Magda Pucci studied indigenous music in Brazil. She and her group Mawaca travelled through the Amazon and played with peoples there such as the Paiter Suruí, Kayapó, Ikolen-Gavião and the Huni-Kuin. PhD defence on 19 March.

More than eighty students of the Honours College track Science & Society completed their thematic courses. Instead of filling out an exam, they presented a documentary or blog series. These new forms of assessments offered a new perspective on topics like homelessness and the use of mobile phones.

Two short documentaries by Till F. Sonnemann highlight the work conducted by Leiden archaeologists on Hispaniola as part of the Nexus1492 project.

The genetic material of currently living Europeans is partly of Neandertal origin. Were our ancestors successful because they were hybridising and interacting with the local populations they encountered when migrating into new places? This subject takes centre stage in a beautiful documentary produced…

University lecturer Miko Flohr talks in a new BBC documentary about how people responded to the eruption of 79, and on whether or not they were excavating a fullonica.

In the student-made documentary, our Field School manager, Dr Arjan Louwen, gives a brief introduction on the importance of the excavation in Oss. Watch the documentary below.

Visual Ethnography graduate Ildikó Plájás received the Best documentary award in the student competition at the international Astra Film Festival in Romania.

He could also have written a paper for his honours assignment,

Wilke Geurds graduated from the Visual Ethnography master's programme last year with her intimate and vulnerable documentary 'F*ck Endo. More than just menstrual pain.'.

The documentary ‘De Stem van het Kind’ (The Voice of the Child) gives an impressive insight into the work of juvenile court judges. Documentary maker Pieter Fleury, Professor of Children’s Rights Ton Liefaard and juvenile court judge Johan Visser worked together for the past seven years to make the…

From documentaries, zines and exhibitions to a video installation. Students of the Visual Ethnography master's programme pulled out all the stops to finish their studies in a fantastic way. For one year, the 23 students worked on their own multimedia projects. The screening of the projects took place…

CADS lecturer Sander Hölsgens is one of the initiators of the NWO Smart Culture Project Documenting Complexity (project number CISC.KC.212). This project investigates how and why engaged documentary filmmakers use new technologies in their work. One of the outputs of this project is the series ‘In Whose…

Ruben van Gaalen used a very unique approach for a course of the research master Colonial and Global History: instead of writing an essay, he went to Dublin and made a documentary about African rappers in Ireland.

The Leiden Archaeology social media team presents its first documentary on one of our faculty's research projects. A team led by Bleda Düring, Victor Klinkenberg, and Maria Hadjigavriel explores the Cypriot Chalcolithic period in Palloures, Cyprus.

Dr Valentina Azzarà, an honorary research fellow at the Faculty of Archaeology and an expert on prehistoric Oman, was recently invited to feature in a National Geographic documentary that aired last year. The opportunity came after a series of discussions and preparations that saw her engage with the…

The documentary invites us to consider the question of what we consider valuable knowledge. “We need to realise that doing and thinking are intertwined in ways we did not comprehend before” argues Maikel Kuijpers, archaeologist and the producer of the documentary. “This will have consequences for the…

Professor Remco Breuker plays the leading role in the new documentary ‘Big in Korea’. Over three Sunday evenings, viewers can follow his journey through South Korea. How has the country developed over the past decades? And what is the impact of last December's failed coup?

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

From Roma standing up for their rights in Ghent, to the comeback of African fashion in Ghana. The documentaries from Visual Ethnography students showcase the beautifully diverse world we live in. On UNESCO Audiovisual Heritage Day, they show why it's so important to document.

Water damage, old restorations and copper corrosion in some illustrations. De Materia Medica has been through a lot over the centuries. The manuscript dates from 1083 AD and is one of the oldest illustrated Arabic manuscripts in the world. Due to intensive use, De Materia Medica was no longer in good…

This research combines archaeological, archaeometric and ethnohistorical research to study the organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino Indians during the Late Ceramic Age (AD 1000-1492).

Four famous alumni introduced their favourite films at Leiden International Film Festival.

By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character, and ambition of Muslim state competency at…

Studium Generale

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors.

How do insurance products transform intimate and personal relations? What are the consequences of the classifications that insurance companies use and how do these affect solidarity, morality and inequality?

Members of the collective are actively involved in various forms of public engagement, including blog posts, podcasts, media interviews, documentaries, museum activities, collaborations with schools, and citizen science.

Bachelor, Master

Escritura de Ñuu Dzaui

How do documentary moving images and fictional narratives involve and evolve each other?

The WARN project seeks to understand why certain warnings fail to reach and impact decision makers in time to avert crisis.

How do sign languages change and spread over time, and how is this influenced by their transmission history?

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

This Festschrift in honour of Cary J. Martin

Orange the World 2025

Orange the World 2025

Are you eager to explore traditional and experimental audiovisual methods for ethnographic research? Do you consider translating your research findings into a documentary? Are you highly motivated, committed and hard working? Then Visual Ethnography is the right specialisation for you! Visual Ethnography…

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Lecture, China Seminar

VR experience | Just Peace Festival