The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA Arts and Culture, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization…

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

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

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA History, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization of…

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA History, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization of…

Do you want to understand how language and culture shape our view of the world? At Leiden University, you explore societies across the globe - from ancient times to the present day. You’ll delve into topics such as migration, identity, media and heritage, and learn to read original sources in their…

The MA Asian Studies East Asian Studies offers focused study of China, Japan or Korea. You can study the country of your choice from an expansive number of disciplinary perspectives including history, literature, art, art history, sociology, anthropology, media, cultural studies, religious studies,…

The one-year Master's specialisation in Ancient History: Empires, Societies and Cultures offers an attractive mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience.

Lecture, Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar

Commonplace - Photographs from the Drummond-Fyvie Collection and the Ngilima Collection. By Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder.

How and to what extent the historic house (re-)constructs identity through image-making in China.

On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Professor Saskia Jaszoltowski, the new Visiting Professor for Central European Studies at Leiden University joined students, colleagues and friends of Austrian Studies at Leiden for a lunch-time talk that introduced her exciting research to our community.

When you choose to study the Assyriology Research MA, you will both be guided through the broadness of Assyriological sub-disciplines, as well as gradually led to develop your own specific research skills.

LIAS has a School of Asian Studies (SAS), a School of Middle-Eastern Studies (SMES) and a School of Religious Studies (LUCSoR). These designations, and the fields within them, remain foundational to our work. At the same time, the academic community benefits from the presence of cross-regional networks…

Building on its extensive holdings in Asian studies, including much material that can support the study of “unofficial” histories and cultures, Leiden University Libraries has established the Leiden Chinese Queer Collection (LCQC).

This collection of essays explores processes of innovation in Greco-Roman technology and science.

Chinese materia medica (CMM), comprising a diverse array of natural substances from plants, animals, and minerals, has been integral to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) throughout history. This study investigates the dynamic evolution of CMM, noting shifts in species for improved therapeutic effects…

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

Links to related organisations, institutes, journals and archives.

Since 2019, the Foundation for Austrian Studies organises an annual lecture in cooperation with the Institute for History.

This book offers novel perspectives on the national and international dimensions of the post-war welfare state in Western Europe and North America.

In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community experience a

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of…

Book by Soledad Valdivia Rivera

This book provides a long-term historical analysis, exploring the roots of the low levels of corruption existing in Chile, going back to the 16th century and examining Chile’s institutional evolution until today.

How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work?

Exploring the language of the lower classes in the nineteenth century

This book compares the policies of Australia and Italy towards boat people who have arrived in the two countries since the early 1990s.

Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1914-1945:

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

The Leiden Centre for Theoretical Philosophy (LCTP) is a platform for analytic philosophy in a broad sense at Leiden University. Its members do research in philosophy of science, philosophy of logic and metaphysics, with a keen interest in the history of topics such as mind, knowledge, truth, and ti…

'Communal Dining in in the Roman West' explores why the practice of privately sponsored communal dining gained popularity in certain parts of the Western Roman Empire for almost 300 years.

This special issue of Politique européenne 2019/4 (N° 66) contains, among others, a contribution by Astrid Van Weyenberg.

Leiden University offers several programmes and courses on Central Asia. There are bachelor and master programmes and there is also the possibility of doing your PhD in Leiden.

Cultural Anthropologist Erik de Maaker published, together with Monica Janoswki (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia in Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS).

Jewish Professor Eduard Meijers (1880-1954), along with 29 other Jewish members of staff, was dismissed by the Nazis in November 1940.

The Central and Eastern European Studies Centre is an interdisciplinary platform of scholars of Leiden University. The Centre’s mission is to bundle together, strengthen and disseminate existing research into the history, politics, and culture of the region, spanning the new member states of the EU,…

This book is an examination of why and how the elective principle, already established in Transylvanian and Polish political culture in the late medieval period, was transformed in the early elections of the 1570s.

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project.

Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present.

The nineteenth century truly was an age of transformation. Throughout Europe processes of industrialization and urbanization, nationalization and centralization, changed the structures of society. It was an age in which the number of people living in urban communities grew substantially.

This volume is pubished in the IMISCOE-AUP Series and edited by Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney.

From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from helping him.

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This book explores the reception of foreign news during the late sixteenth-century civil wars in France and the Netherlands.

In this 3-volume set of primary sources, Lionel Laborie and Ariel Hessayon bring together a wide range of vital sources for the study of prophecy in the early modern world. This meticulously edited collection includes rare material and fascinating manuscripts published in English for the first time.