The project interrogates the relationship between impartiality and power and asks whether impartiality as a cornerstone of global governance can – and ought to – be re-envisioned in the context of changing global governance power relations.

Emily Wolff, PhD candidate at Leiden University, wrote a paper about the inclusion of imperial citizens in the Dutch post-war welfare state.

Seven large reproductions of works by Rembrandt on seven University buildings in the centre of Leiden reveal the relationship between the painter and the University. Rembrandt van Rijn enrolled in the University in 1620 and painted the portraits of various alumni of the University. The exhibition runs…

By analysing neglected (continental) spy centres and integrating these groups of female intelligencers into the traditional, male-orientated historical narratives, this project will proceed towards a gendered history of early modern espionage.

Landscapes of mobility in the northern Chilean altiplano: from chiefly networks to colonial markets (AD 1100-1800).

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

The starting point of Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement.

Read on these pages all about the history of Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands. The Academia Lugduna Batava was founded in 1575 and its motto is: Libertatis Praesidium ('Bastion of Freedom').

The Museums, Collections & Society research programme is led by the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Archaeology and aims to promote collection-based research, stimulate Leiden education in this field, and raise ethical questions regarding the collections’ origins.

The project investigates the changing local context of crime dynamics and the responses by selected international organizations and national governments. It places a major emphasis on security management at the trans-national level by investigating intra-regional security cooperation between Latin America,…

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?

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

This project combines and reconsiders all the available evidence of the Scheurrak SO1, and use new archival databases and modern archaeological techniques to shed new light on the material culture of the Baltic grain trade and the Holland shipbuilding industry at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Leiden University has a longstanding and dynamic partnership with institutions in Indonesia. The collaboration is rooted in a shared commitment to advancing knowledge and science through collaborative research, education, and equitable knowledge exchange. The partnership reflects a relationship of mutual…

The community & communication workgroup serves as an umbrella that – in addition to its own activities – works with all three workgroups on the community and communication related aspects of their activities

Team Dutch and Colonial History

In Leiden University’s master’s programme Literature in Society. Europe and Beyond you will develop your knowledge of the interactive relationship between literature and society, focusing on key political and social issues from a transnational perspective.

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

In developing cooperation with Indonesia, Leiden University focuses on projects that benefit culture, nature, society and economy, in Indonesia as well as in the Netherlands.

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

How were war heroes and war criminals created, and how do these images relate to the historical context?

LIAS PhD program activities include thematic coursework (the PhD Seminars), skills training, research talks, social events, and so on. Skills training sessions and research talks are moderated by the director of doctoral studies. All events are open to all LIAS PhD candidates, including visiting sch…

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

The project results and dissemination activities listed here below are the results at the closure of the ICM 2019 project (Summer 2022).

How does speculative literature respond to or incorporate the aural, sonic, or noisy? How are sonic technologies co-opted into practices of worldbuilding? How does the speculative mode of artistic and literary enquiry generate new possibilities of listening?

The LUCDH foster the development of new digital research by awarding a number of Small Grants each year. These are our past awardees.

Research conducted in this group aims at furthering our understanding of how communities and individuals deal with social change, conflict and trauma through remembrance and commemoration as well as forgetting in the arts.

This article explores an emerging “cultural turn” in intelligence studies, which, if fully realized, could entail the expansion of the discipline to include new methodologies and theories, and a more integrative understanding of historical causality that locates intelligence agencies within the widersocio-cultural…

Why did 'character', 'habit', and 'virtue' serve as key terms in late 19th and early 20th-century scholarly correspondences, biographies, and obituaries? Why did scholars around 1900 display so much interest in the working habits and character traits of what they called the 'scholarly self'?

The specialisation Global Order in Historical Perspective of the master’s in International Relations at Leiden University focuses on examining the historical processes and practices in the making of global order.

Central to Nuranisa’s PhD project is the cultural diplomacy practiced by the Javanese courts of central Java (Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Pakualaman and Mangkunegaran) in response to the increasing Dutch colonial power in the 19th and early 20th century.

The Institute for History is pleased to announce the launch of a new research program: Cosmopolis Advanced, an initiative of the Institute for History at Leiden University (LU) in partnership with Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta.

Ustadh Mau Digital Archive project (UMADA) is among the UCLA Library 29 international cultural preservation projects supported by the Modern Endagered Archive Program (Cohort 3). From the 3rd up to the 5th of October, a digitization training workshop took place on Lamu island, on the so-called northern…

Marian Klamer's LAISEANG project has been awarded a research grant by CLARIN.

The Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) accepted the request for subsidy to digitise the archive of the archaeological fieldwork at Tell Deir Alla in the eastern Jordan Valley. The subsidy comes from its KDP-program (Small Data Project) and is meant to promote digitisation of important datasets.…

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

Memory, Imagination, and Mimetics in Contemporary Composition and Historical Performance

You have been admitted to a PhD track at Leiden University. What do you need to know when you start conducting your PhD research?

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

The skin has recently gained attention within body studies for its many specific cultural and social associations, in addition to its biology. This project aims to examine the different layers of meaning and the functions invested in the skin in ancient Greece: how did ancient Greek literary and medical…

Experimental research

The role of transnational, non-institutional networks in the opening up of British transatlantic trade at the end of the 17th/beginning of the 18th century