How did “free agents” (entrepreneurs operating outside of the myriad of interests of the centralized, state-sponsored monopolies) in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire react to the creation of colonial monopolies (royal monopolies and chartered companies) by the central states in the Early Modern…

Aristotle's Poetics: the oldest and most influential work of western literary theory.

Lizzy van Dorp enrolled at Leiden University in 1893 to study Literature. But the ambitious student changed path and became the first woman in the Netherlands to study law.

Monday 29 January, the annual meeting of Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Safety and Security (LDE CSS) took place at Wijnhaven. The conference started with pitches of projects financed via seed money of LDE CSS. Followed by interaction in small groups to formulate research and education topics for the…

The University of Limerick (Ierland) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to explore aspects of nonconformity and deviance in the early modern world of learning. Deadline for proposals: May 11.

Scientist looked for the genetic footprint of fire use in our genes, but found that our prehistoric cousins - the Neanderthals - and even the great apes seem better at dealing with the toxins in smoke than modern humans.

An interdisciplinary and innovative research group combining History, underwater archaeology, GIS and wood provenancing methods.

Registration is open.

The central aim is examining gender differences in recorded crime, particularly in relation to interpersonal violence, in early modern Bologna.

How did nineteenth century scholars evaluate each other and each other’s work through more or less informal practices of peer review?

Radboud University is looking for a PhD researcher who will investigate the afterlife of medieval thought in early modern Europe through the study of concrete instances of intellectual transfer, for instance the appropriation of specific medieval authors or early modern revaluations of specific themes…

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

As a critical commemoration of its centenary, this book presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey.

What is the size and composition of the Dutch urban mine? How will the urban mine develop over time, and how can it be used as a source of materials as part of a circular economy?

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern.

The Historia Naturalis Brasiliae Reconsidered

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions research area will be presented on 9 September, in the form a conference. The keynote speaker is Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of the Asia Research Institute of the Singapore National University. The title of his address is Sustainability and…

The Patriot behind the pot tells the story of pottery, people and politics in the Netherlands during a time of great revolutions -revolutions both in a political and industrial sense.

Studying Sumerian grammar in your free time: Bram Jagersma did it. He described centuries-old Sumerian using a modern method he devised himself. For this PhD research he was awarded the De La Court Award for Independent Research by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science (KNAW).

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.

The book on Turkey. A Modern History written by Professor Erik-Jan Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, is now available in nine different languages. Arabic and Polish versions have now been published.

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

Het is een wijdverbreid idee dat (post-)middeleeuwse steden een sterfteoverschot hadden en zij slechts in leven konden blijven door de toestroom van migranten; een fenomeen dat bekend staat als het ‘urban graveyard’-effect. Over details valt te twisten, maar duidelijk is dat de stad en de dood dichter…

On the 19th of April, Iris van de Voorde successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Iris on this achievement!

The Modern Migration Policy Act aims to ensure that the admission of regular migrants is effective and manageable.

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.

Professor Joke Bouwstra has been elected as member of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW, The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences). This is a very prestigious recognition and a great honor for Joke. You can find the announcement by the KNAW below (short version) and as an attachment.

The Middle East has a rich literary tradition, which is steadily gaining a foothold in the West. Modern literary works deal with contemporary issues, such as the legacy of colonialism, the struggles between traditionalism and modernity, the place of women in society and the war in Israel/Palestine.

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

Tim Koopmans is one of the great minds in the history of Dutch and European legal scholarship. He taught law as a professor in Leiden and other universities, among which Ghent, Cambridge, Utrecht. He practiced it as a judge in the European Court of Justice and Advocate-General in the Dutch Supreme Court,…

Many of our staff and students have won an award, received a grant, obtained an academic fellowship for their quality or have been socially engaged due to their specific expertise. See below for an overview per year.

On Wednesday 25 June 2025 Dechun Zhang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This project studies the development of civic engagement in the Netherlands from the mid-eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries, through a focus on the local and regional levels.

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?

In 2016, Marcel Cobussen successfully applied for two trainee positions at ACPA, funded by the Humanities Research Traineeship Programme at Leiden University. One of the results, a multi-media essay 'In Search of the Public. Exploring Contemporary Performance Practices of Classical Music in The Netherlands'…

From 16 to 26 July, the Leiden Institute of Physics organizes its annual summer school, titled ‘Modern Physics at all Scales’.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?