What was the stringed instrument known in medieval and early Renaissance Italy as “cetra”?

Bird, butterfly, fish: when you look through a children’s book, you usually don’t think about the fact that humans divided these animals, depicted in bright colours, into categories. Yet, this division has been discussed for centuries. In her PhD dissertation, Didi van Trijp shows how natural scientists…

Numismatic research of Roman coin hoards in the Netherlands. The use of numismatic sources is incorporated in Claes’s research project “Dialogues of Power”. This project aims to analyse the legitimising dialogue between Roman emperors and their Germanic legions during the so-called “crisis of the third…

From colonial times through to the present day, large numbers of Javanese have left their homes to settle in other parts of Indonesia or much further afield. Frequently this dispersion was forced, often with traumatic results.

Five research projects of the Institute for History have been selected for the Research Traineeship Programme 2016-2017. The programme was initiated by The Faculty of Humanities to offer motivated students the opportunity to develop themselves in academic research. In December the research trainees,…

Het College van Bestuur laat door een postdoc een eenjarig vooronderzoek doen naar het koloniale en slavernijverleden van de Universiteit Leiden.

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

The subject of this thesis is Alverata, a twenty-first-century typeface whose design was inspired by the shapes of Romanesque capitals such as those found in inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The University of Limerick (Ierland) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to explore aspects of nonconformity and deviance in the early modern world of learning. Deadline for proposals: May 11.

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

In a speech on Keti Koti the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of the royal family for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery. What is the significance of this?

The ERC-project CaPANES (Causal Pattern Analysis of Economic Sovereignty) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher and two PhD's. This project addresses economic sovereignty of commercial cities in the period of c. 1400-c. 1620. Deadline for applications: November 4.

Most people would not even consider it, starting a PhD at the age of 62. However, for the former Teylers Museum curator Bert Sliggers it was like a dream that came true: ‘The opportunity I was given felt like a gift, it brought me and Teylers Museum a lot.’

Diversity Outdoors seeks to investigate how social inequalities are embodied through a comparative analysis of participation in outdoor recreation in Europe. We ask: What are the effects of ethnoracial embodiment on sociocultural diversity in outdoor recreation? How are bodies constituted as in or out…

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

How should the Quran be read? The manuscript of this holy book makes different interpretations possible. Researcher Marijn van Putten has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of two million euros to explore centuries-old recitations.

For the project ‘Professionals and the People’ Tilburg University is looking for a historian with a PhD with passion for archival research. The postdoc will investigate the administrative culture and the functioning of urban civil servants in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern…

How did disability become a global concern? In this project we will identify the contribution of international agencies, governmental and non-governmental organizations and, just as importantly, disabled people themselves, to the IYDP and by showing the connections, interactions and entanglements between…

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

How did nineteenth century scholars evaluate each other and each other’s work through more or less informal practices of peer review?

Lecture, Book Roundtable

How do first-hand narratives of war of commanders in the front line relate to the official narrative of the Eighty Years’ War?

It is crucial that Leiden University reflects on its colonial history. These were the words of Cleveringa Professor Gert Oostindie in his inaugural lecture on 24 November. ‘As a university community, we must dare to hold up a mirror to ourselves and, where possible and necessary, also take concrete…

This project explores themes at the intersection of maritime history and environmental history by looking at the problems Dutch ships encountered in the different climates of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and the solutions they could provide.

The Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (VVI) is part of the Leiden Law School.

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Tab…

The Women’s March was held on 9 March 2019 in Amsterdam and many students and members of staff from Leiden University took part in speaking out against oppression and making societal change.

Ömer Gürlesin defended his thesis on 28 November 2018

Punching Back is a detailed ethnographic study that demonstrates that young Muslim women who kickbox develop agentive selves by challenging gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

This article by Malte Reimann and Antonio Cerella explores how politics and medicine have become deeply intertwined, using the thought of Roberto Esposito to reimagine this relationship through the lens of an affirmative biopolitics.

This research cluster is a part of the Institute of Political Science’s research programme ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’. Its members study phenomena such as migration, immigration, citizenship, integration, ethnic parties, minority and caste-based politics, borders and migration,…

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

Lecture

This study employs a comparative perspective to identify generic and specific qualities of petitions and petitioning. It charts the chronological development of petitioning practices over centuries. The interdisciplinary approaches provide range of conceptual and methodological expertise for reade…

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

This study interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential.

In this article, Ben de Jong, research fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, examines the relationship between double agents and their handlers.

International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970

The Executive Board of Leiden University has appointed Dr Alicia Schrikker as Professor of Dutch History in the World, effective 1 January 2026. The chair is based at the Institute of History (Faculty of Humanities).