The hinterland of important centres like Petra (Southern Jordan) can provide essential information that contribute to the understanding of their rise, expansion and decline.

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language.

Classics alumnus Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer has won the Libris Literature Prize this year with his book La Superba. The Libris Literature Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in Dutch literature.

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted…

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Digital Activism’ by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and…

Professor Petra Sijpesteijn has been elected as an International Fellow of the British Academy, a prestigious recognition that highlights her exceptional contributions to the study of early Islamic history.

Neo-Baroque construction and deconstruction of the concepts of paradise in fiction.

AI has huge societal and economic potential and is widely used. But it also brings challenges: how do we combine human values with AI, how do we make AI more transparent and understandable, and what can AI and human cognition learn from each other, for example about language learning?

Study of human cultures using computational approaches

To what extent can digital technologies be considered as authorities?

Study of human cultures using computational approaches

The digitisation of society is a worldwide challenge. Not only are robots increasingly taking over human tasks, they are even beating the world champion at solving the most difficult brainteasers.

The Dutch Center for Travel Writing Studies s a scientific center that develops and coordinates initiatives to promote research into travel writing. It actively seeks contact with external (scientific and social) partners to collaborate on issues surrounding cultural / national identity, cultural contact…

Political and social implications of life in a digital age.

The Digital Archaeology research group manages two computer laboratories with different purposes: the teaching lab (F1.01) and the research lab (A1.13a).

This interdisciplinary project explores the promise and perils of human rights as a suitable framework for addressing the challenges posed by the governance of digital platforms.

When Petra Sijpesteijn became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, she was the only Dutch member with an appointment at a Dutch university. Two years later, she is also the only Dutch member of the Austrian Academy and officially joined the British Academy on 7 October.

Symposium

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

This project aims to excavate and date the setting of the east gate of the Roman fortress of Udhruḥ. This will be compared with other Diocletianic military installations from the region. We also hope to retrieve another gate inscription which can shed light on the function and political embedding of…

Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 51

This paper will address how digital affordances (Grasseni and Walter 2014) of the interactive documentary are an epistemological tool that shapes and fosters comparative reflections in collaborative ethnographic projects. To do so, I will analyse the process of planning and coding an i-doc (interactive…

In this article, the authors summarise the literature on the effects of multilevel governance on governments’ policy responses to Covid-19.

The School for Digital Deaf Studies 2025 is a hybrid school consisting of one week school in person in Ghana (15 - 24 August), followed by a one week school online later this year. It aims for the capacity building needed to expand academic research and education activities in digital Deaf studies,…

This Research project is funded by the 7th European Community Framework Programme, with additional funds from NWO Aspasia grant, and in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley.

The first of the two volumes of this co-authored study has just been published by Metzler. The study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic Empire expanded at a tremendous pace. Within a hundred years, it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian subcontinent. How did such a rapidly conquered territory become one empire? Professor Petra Sijpesteijn has been awarded a Vici grant…

Online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) have become part and parcel of everyday media use. Journalists incorporate posts from politicians into newspaper reports, scientists share their insights in short posts or videos, and the judiciary uses social media to explain their…

DIGIFOOD is a transnational research project that investigates how data governance can support equitable and sustainable digital food systems. Around the world, digital technologies are transforming agriculture. Sensors in soil, satellites in space, and mobile phones in farmers’ hands are generating…

This month, the volume Reading Russian Literature, 1980-2024, edited by Otto Boele and Dorine Schellens, was published at Palgrave Macmillan.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressing question is how this global health emergency impacted the research agendas of the field of crisis and disaster science. This article reviewed contributions in ten important crisis and disaster journals in the two and a half years following the COVID-19…

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (AIBL), one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France, has elected professor Petra Sijpesteijn as foreign corresponding member (correspondant étranger), to fill the seat of the renowned Egyptologist Edda Bresciani.

In this paper, Sarah Giest and Bram Klievink highlight the effects of AI implementation on public sector innovation. This is explored by asking how AI-driven technologies in public decision-making in different organizational contexts impacts innovation in the role definition of bureaucrats.

How are digital risk-profiles developed and used in practice?

Dynamical systems describe the evolution of objects in a space over time and may be used to model physical phenomena. Due to this, much research is dedicated to understanding the mathematics of dynamical systems.

In its session of 15 April 2024, the Austrian Academy of Sciences elected professor Petra Sijpesteijn as one of its new Corresponding Members.