One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2023.

Building a Deep Cross-media Transfer Network to extract visual relations that relieve the problem of insufficient training data for visual tasks.

In a recent article published on PLOS, Drs. Briana Pobiner and Ryan McRae of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History discuss the top 13 discoveries in human evolution in 2023.

On the 23rd of June Arianna Sacco successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Since the publication of the article in the interdisciplinary journal Nature, over 200 news outlets have showcased the pioneering research.

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various Dutch cities in the early modern period.

Mazatec chants and ancient Mesoamerican pictography

Fascinating images, articles of clothing and other unique objects from the past four centuries of the history of Leiden University can now be seen in the ‘Celebrating Curiosity’ exhibition in the hall of Rapenburg 70.

Intelligence scholars have been struggling to find the conditions under which international intelligence cooperation occurs. Most focus on transactional motives and guaranteed returns, the so called ‘Quid pro Quo’. At the same time, trust is often mentioned as one of the foremost conditions, yet it…

This article examines how motivational signals in job advertisements relate to public employers’ recruitment success.

Otrar as a Case Study for a 6-10th century Transition Zone

This year the PhDs of the institute had their traditional day out (uitje) to The Hague. The last two years they had stayed in Leiden, so The Hague already seemed like quite the adventure. Indeed, it seems almost that as time progresses and more and more archives become digitized, history PhDs slowly…

How can wide-scale applications of isotope analyses and isotope mapping contribute to the identification of ancient migrants and their origins in the Western Caribbean? Can we observe linkages between individual behaviors and long-term patterns, for example as manifested in continuous waves of migration?…

Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

On the 20th of June, Camil Staps successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Camil on this achievement!

This research proposal focuses on historically informed performance (HIP) and adaptive performance practices within the late 18th-century German musical context.

More on the Dutch webpage.

In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in East African country Uganda, the word for photographs is Ebifananyi. However, ebifananyi does not, contrary to the etymology of the word photographs, relate to light writings. Ebifananyi instead means things that look like something else. Ebifananyi…

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

On the 27th of June, Timothy Mac Hadjah successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Timothy on this achievement!

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

PhD defence

This project’s aim is to critically assess current homicide data sources in order to develop a proposal for long-term EU-level monitoring of DRH.

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

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.

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

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

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,…

The ability to create objects and structures with our hands has been essential to human development. This ability is something modern society is at risk of losing. Leiden archaeologists gather knowledge about ancient processes of ‘making and creating’ over the centuries, knowledge that helps our current…

Maurits Berger's new English-language podcast, Matters of Humanities: History of Islam in Europe covers no fewer than thirteen centuries of history. In eight episodes, professor of Islam and the West Maurits Berger argues that the Islam and Muslims are an important part of European history: ‘That was…