Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is one of the broadest of its kind, offering courses in no fewer than 80 different languages and a very broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent.

Enduring influence of Roman law

Our research deals with the deep history of Europe and Eurasia, from the inception of farming up until the beginning of the Roman Period. This was a period in which key developments took place that had a profound impact on European landscapes and society until the present day. Our research and teaching…

On the 13th of November, Hanna Fricke successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Hanna on this achievement.

In this book Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later.

LUCAS members are experts in the fields of literary history and theory, film and media studies, and art, architectural, and book history. Members of LUCAS teach in a wide variety of Bachelor's, Master’s, and Research Master’s Programmes.

This master’s programme explores the history of the written and printed word, publishing practices, and digital textual media.

Due to the almost complete disappearance of the archive of the Old Dutch West India Company (WIC, 1621-1674) not much is known about the ships and crews of this company. In this project we start the reconstruction of this basic information making use of new digital humanities techniques to extract this…

The essay For progress has been published to mark the 450th Dies Natalis of Leiden University. In 2025, we are celebrating our 450th anniversary, and the theme of this special year is Ahead of the Times.

When researching languages in historical context, our goal is to understand the nature of linguistic variation in the past, and explain the extent to which the socio-cultural context of bygone times contributed to shaping linguistic variation and change.

If you are interested in an academic programme, but do you not wish to complete the entire programme? Then, you can choose one of the many à la carte courses the Faculty of Humanities offers.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

This thesis investigates how galaxies form and what diversifies the evolutionary histories of galaxies.

On Wednesday 24 September 2025 Marija Šerić successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Biodiversity & Evolution research theme is to understand what are the key drivers of plant biodiversity during evolution with a focus on plant life history and resilience traits and develop tools to restore and maintain plant biodiversity.

Lecture, Book Launch

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.