This book is a result of the collective research project Urban Societies in the Port Towns of Atlantic Europe in the Late Middle Ages. It studies the connections between diplomacy and trade from a comparative and transnational perspective throughout medieval Atlantic Europe.

This book examines how renewed forms of artistic activism were developed in the wake of the neoliberal repression since the 1980s.

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion?

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.

Lecture, Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar

Lecture, Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar

World history, connectivity and material culture, edited by Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys. From Cambridge University Press.

As a practice in which human beings were held captive for an indefinite period of time, coerced into extremely dependent and exploitative power relationships, denied rights (including rights over their labor, lives, and bodies), often vulnerable to forced relocation by various means, and forced to labor…

LCCP is envisaged as an open space for stimulating discussion, critical debate and inventive co-operation in the Dutch philosophical community. It does not pursue a specific agenda but welcomes different readings of our shared philosophical situation, because it believes that deeper understanding is…

How German Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism.

The 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics will be held from 7 to 11 June 2021 at Leiden University.

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.

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

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…

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

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.

This multidisciplinary minor within the department of Latin American Studies offers the opportunity to combine language acquisition courses in Spanish or Portuguese with modules in the history, literature, culture and cinema of Spanish America and Brazil. Students can choose to follow the Spanish or…

Every year, an NWO PhD in the Humanities grant is awarded to a prospective PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology. This year, the grant went to Maia Casna, enabling her to study respiratory disease in the past. ‘My hypothesis is that the rapid formation of cities in the medieval Netherlands, must…

‘Archeologists don’t dig up explanations, let alone certainties,’ says Joanita Vroom, Professor of Archaeology of Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia. ‘Their job is to bridge the gap between the sherds that they find and people’s everyday lives. What do ceramics from the past say about people’s eating…

This project focuses on Dutch registration of land and people in rural Sri Lanka. How did the practice of “fixating” the fluid social relations and dynamic daily practices into categories affect family strategies of reproduction and survival?

To be eligible for Museum Studies at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

The oldest university in the Netherlands has produced many well-known scientists. Some of them are known to the wider public; others are perhaps less well known, but their achievements are no less impressive.

This one-year master's programme explores the political and cultural evolution of the world from a long-term, and broad comparative perspective. This creates a better understanding of the entangled nature of today's society.

Alumni event, Arts and Culture

What are the immediate and lasting effects of the colonial encounters on indigenous Caribbean cultures and societies and what were the intercultural dynamics that took place during the colonisation processes? How can the study of indigenous Caribbean histories contribute to a more sophisticated awareness…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.

This research project, that started in September 2008, aims to explore how personal and public memories of the Dutch Revolt in the seventeenth century evolved and interacted to create new political and cultural identities for the societies that eventually were to become the kingdoms of the Netherlands…

Linguistic research on a unique collection of Dutch letters allowed us to gain access to the every-day language of people from various walks of life. Private letters by men, women and even children have been elaborately explored in the Letters as Loot researchprogramme, initiated and directed by prof.…

Overview of the Asia Programmes offered at Leiden University.

Join-in courses zijn MA-cursussen over middeleeuwse onderwerpen gegeven binnen vastgestelde MA-programma's van de zes deelnemende universiteiten van de Onderzoekschool. Op aanvraag zijn deze vakken toegankelijk voor studenten van andere (Nederlandse) universiteiten. De cursusbelasting en het aantal…