This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

Gold Matters: Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: A Multi-Actor and Trans-Regional Perspective.This project explores whether a transformative approach towards sustainability can arise in Artisanal and Smallscale Gold Mining (ASGM).

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

Conducting research on reliability of journalism and the trust in media.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

A Biography of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822–1914)

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University proudly establishes the Blaise Pascal chair. The chair applies for one year and is meant to strengthen the cooperation of the Leiden computer science research with foreign institutes.

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

On 30 November, Florian Theissen defended the thesis 'Sincerely believing in freedom: a reconstruction and comparison of the interpretation of the freedom of religion and belief on the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights'. The doctoral…

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

What can we learn from how maritime conflicts were managed in the past? What significance did Maritime Conflict Management have in shaping the standards of diplomacy and international law in pre-modern Atlantic Europe (1200-1600)?

As of 1 September Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed as Professor of Southern African History in the Leiden Institute for History, in conjunction with the African Studies Centre, Leiden.

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Is it possible to formulate a new conceptual foundation for attributing an evaluative role to historiography of science, without relinquishing the historiographic sensitivity of recent work in the discipline?

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking in late 5th- and 4th-century philosophical circles.

This project looks at the ways in which youth in southern Nigeria navigate their lives in a context of experiencing long-term socioeconomic uncertainty and political insecurity (duress).

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Which genes are involved in woodiness and associated traits such as drought tolerance, flowering time, stem elongation, life span, and plant herbivory, and how do these gene regulatory pathways overlap?

Bordering Up: Regulating Mobility Through Passes, Walls and Guards

Countries in the Global South, including India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria, are gaining increasing influence in the world economy and in international decision-making. The Netherlands and Europe should strengthen ties with these countries to avoid being sidelined, according to the urgent advice…

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

Science diplomacy, broadly defined as all activities at the intersection of science and foreign policy, has become a buzzword during the past ten years.

In a podcast episode of 'New Books in History' Claire Weeda talks about her book 'Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion'.

A defining fixture of our contemporary world, video games offer a rich spectrum of engagements with the past.

Cambridge History of South Africa, volume 1: From early times to 1885 (edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross) made Choice magazine's list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010.

The Institute for History announces vacancies for three PhD positions on Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective and one PhD position to conduct research on the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

This study aims to examine how South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and Japan, two neighboring countries in Northeast Asia, have been responding to and mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion?